Air Force Reserves vs. Navy Reserves

[GuelnRn]

For any California Nurse reserves in the Air Force or Navy I would appreciate any input.

I am a critical care nurse at USC and have a year and a half of ICU experience and half a year on telemetry.

I have been working with two recruiters one from the Air Force and the other in the Navy and am at a cross roads... The Air Force has offered clinical nurse and the Navy is offering a 15k sign on bonus for critical care. I'm trying to decide which one to go for and plan on doing the minimum 3 years in the active Reserves and do the one weekend a month and two weeks per year.

So here are my questions...

1. How do deployments work for each branches reserve units for nurses? Mandatory vs voluntary and for how long on average?

2. What is the minimum amount of years is the initial commitment?

3. What is the work environment like and the patient care? I hear it's mostly admin and nurses don't see much patient care due to corpsmen and medics

4. Critical care vs clinic nurse specialty? (I like the bonus but if I'm more likely to be ordered to deploy as a critical care nurse I'd much rather do clinic nursing.

I don't mean to offend anyone about my concerns for deployment. I've wanted to serve out of nursing school as an active duty nurse when I was single but didn't get commissioned after a long process. Now that I have experience, I'm no longer single and long deployments would be challenging for my partner. I would love to deploy for shorter missions and whatnot but the thought of 9 months to a year is quite frankly daunting.

Would really appreciate the help of those currently serving as nurse reservists!

[jfratian, DNP, RN, CRNA]

You want to serve but only a little bit? I'm not really sure why you'd want to be in the military if you find deployments daunting. That's literally the whole job: get ready to deploy, deploy, rest for a while, and repeat. Why not join the VA or get a RN job through usajobs.gov if you want to help the military population without deploying? You can volunteer to take someone else's deployment sometimes, but typically you are forced to deploy; it's not optional.

In the Air Force Nurse Corps, you are given a deployment band that generally makes you vulnerable to deploy 6 months out of every 2 years. It's not always exactly 6 months, but 6 months is average length. Right now many people aren't deploying even when it is their turn; deployments are not as common right now.

Clinical nurse is the Air Force equivalent of 'un-specialized.' It's where they lump Inpatient Med-surg, PACU/day surgery, GI, outpatient clinics, and a bevy of ancillary roles (disease management, executive officer, infection control, etc).

You are correct that nurses with a specialty (OR, ER, ICU, etc) are more likely to deploy.

It's hard to tell what you'll be doing unless you ask nurses that work at the reserves unit near you. My guess is that you live near a Navy Hospital that has an ICU, and the AF base near you only has a small clinic without any inpatient units.

[GuelnRn]

It's not me but my family and friends who are having difficulty with my need to serve and possibility to deploy... they don't understand how I would risk being sent somewhere and leaving and putting everything on hold when as a nurse in California at a well known hospital is already a reality for me. Im just in a bind right now trying to do something I've always felt the need to with little support. The VA is actually a great idea and i recently contacted the nearest one's nurse recruiter but still waiting to hear back.