Experienced nurses answer this...

medical office nursing

educators (diabetes, nursing school)

telephonic nursing advice/triage

Utilization review

Discharge Planning

Patient care manager

Most of these jobs either require some education beyond the ADN level or some years of experience working as a nurse.

i don't think the office nurses or special procedure nurses of the world are pencil pushers. as an iv therapist i hardly ever got a break and was putting in picc lines in the mornings, suturing them in place and looking at their final x-rays. i spent the remainder of my 12 hour shifts answering pages that never stopped to restart ivs. it's a highly skilled licensed nursing activity. many of the others require a good deal of hospital experience that one earns to get those positions, so in effect those nurses come up through the ranks and "pay their dues" to get there. they also need to utilize critical thinking skills to stay in those positions. what i learned in nursing school and throughout my 30 years as a nurse is that rns are leaders and managers of care. hands on nursing is only one aspect of the job and something that can be delegated to someone else on the nursing team who is competent to do it while the rn leader takes care of other fires that need stamping out. i would recommend that anyone who wanted to do hands on nursing care exclusively become a nursing assistant. an rn, unfortunately, doesn't typically have that luxury. healthcare facilities expect and pay good salaries for the more advanced thinking and decision making activities of rns, many of which are now mandated by law in order for them to keep their state operating licenses, jcaho accreditation and medicare certification.

I guess I wonder what the concern is? Is this a nurse who is concerned about infection control - then more education might be needed. Is this a nurse who has had a transplant and is worried about her own immunosuppression?

So - without knowing the concerns of the OP - its hard for me to say.

Daytonite, the nursing assistants in my unit do absolutely no hands-on care. No baths, no turns, no boosting up in bed, no diaper changes, no feeds, no linen changes, nada. They restock bedside carts, empty urometers, fold linen, run specimens to the lab and pick up blood products from the blood bank. They don't even set up for admissions or change suction canisters. All of that is my job. It's a huge problem for all of us, because we're not staffed to allow for them not to be in there helping, and they're resentful that they're not allowed.

I do agree than most of the types of nursing work that doesn't involve any exposure to body fluids are the ones you have to work in the trenches to get. How do we trust someone giving us advice over the phone who hasn't actually spent time working in bedside care?