Advice Needed! Final Nursing Placement

[nursesunshine.xx]

Hi everyone!

I'm looking for some advice for picking my final nursing placement. Just a bit of background about my placements that I have completed to date: Long-Term Care, Rehab, Med-Surg, Community, and Mental Health. I'm deciding between Med-Surg, or Pediatrics.

I'm thinking about med-surg because I want to improve my confidence in my nursing skills, and work on prioritization and managing a heavy patient load. During my med-surg placement, I wasn't able to be as independent since our instructor only let us work with one patient each. It would also be nice to be hired on the unit I work on, and gain the basic med-surg experience for my first few years working before moving on to specialties.

However, I've always loved working with children and find that I'm most interested in my pediatrics and maternity courses. The reason I'm worried is because I have not had any experience in pediatrics, so I feel that this is my last chance to get experience within this setting. I think that it would be more challenging to get into pediatric nursing without any clinical experience whatsoever, and think that I might be limiting my chances to get into pediatrics if I don't pick this.

Any thoughts?

[compassionresearcher]

If you want to be a pediatric nurse when you graduate, then take pediatrics. Pediatrics is med/surg for children, so in a way, you would be doing both.