Areas of Shortage?

Hi, I will be starting nursing school January 17, 2006 and was wondering about the nursing shortages. I know that there are overall nursing shortages but is anyone able to tell me what areas of nursing have the most shortages and why? Just curious. Thanks.

Congratulations! I start the 9th so hope to see you aound the site.

My advice would be for you to become an RN.

Hi' date=' I will be starting nursing school January 17, 2006 and was wondering about the nursing shortages. I know that there are overall nursing shortages but is anyone able to tell me what areas of nursing have the most shortages and why? Just curious. Thanks.[/quote']

I would say the largest shortage of nurses would be in the area of Med/Surg. This is because Med/Surg (Medical - Surgical nursing) is the most common area of nursing; it's also the area where most nursing students spend a lot of their clinical time. Although many large hospitals will take new grads into other areas such as labor/delivery, pediatrics, emergency dept., operating room most graduates get their first job in med/surg. Hmm...what else... oh, I know of many critical care units that seem to be desperate.

In my area, there are always a ton of people applying for the one or two Labor/Delivery and Operating Room vacancies that come up every few months... we certainly don't have a shortage of those, however, things could be different in other parts of the country.

One nurse there is definitely not a shortage of would be nurse practitioners (but that requires graduate school). My area is beyond saturated with them (and I'm not even in northern California where I hear you can't swing a cat without hitting one) that the unit I was on last year had two working at the bedside on med/surg (and weren't happy about it).

I think it's really regional. Here, we seem to be much more short of trained critical care nurses than anything else. Anyone with experience in ICU, CCU, NICU, MICU, SICU, etc. can pretty much write their own ticket.