Going from community/public health to hospital bedside nursing?

Specialties Public/Community

Published

Specializes in Indigenous Health, Virtual Care & Medicine.

Hello,

I am a recent graduate nurse with no previous work experiences in nursing (other than our rotations) and was offered an interview for a full-time community health nursing position in a remote area. Community health is a passion of mine, but I am not a person who likes to settle in one specialty early on in the career. I want to gain as many experience and knowledge regarding different specialties before I finally settle. So, I hope to work in a hospital on a med/surg floor in a year or two. I know hospitals will offer orientation to any newly-hired nurses to the floor anyways, so I believe I would pick it up fast once I'm exposed to the work environment. But I want to make sure that I'm not completely limited to community health nursing once I enter my foot into it. Therefore, I would like to inquire about the feasibility and likelihood of working at the bedside in a big hospital after a year or two of working as a community health nurse?

Any nurses who have done that in the past ? What are the challenges and goodnesses encountered during the transition? Was it hard to transfer from community health to bedside nursing? How did the employers/HR at the hospital react to your background in community nursing?

Thanks a lot for the help and feedback!

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Hi, I realize this is an older post, but I'm just curious about whether you decided to go from community health to bedside.

I'm currently working in a community clinic. I like my job, but I mostly do phone triage, so I often find myself daydreaming about the bedside and direct patient care. I'm a new grad, so I'm hoping I didn't confine myself to one specialty so early in my career.

Thanks for any input!

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Specializes in Cardiac Telemetry.

I'm currently debating leaving my bedside nurse job and going into public health. Working bedside will do wonders for your assessment and critical thinking skills but been feeling burned out lately by the excessive (some VERY pointless) charting, awful demanding management and being thrown under the bus for everything.

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8 hours ago, Wrestler133 said:

I'm currently debating leaving my bedside nurse job and going into public health. Working bedside will do wonders for your assessment and critical thinking skills but been feeling burned out lately by the excessive (some VERY pointless) charting, awful demanding management and being thrown under the bus for everything.

Nursing is demoralizing, crude, cruel and unprofessional. The 24/ 7 institutions expect that we take on more and more, and more, with less and less support. I once worked on a computerized charting program that had endless check boxes, and you could not save / or progress to the next screen, without checking 100% of the boxes, and curiously "not done" was never one of the options. This is what i like to call forced falsification, which I refuse to do.

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I recently got a job in acute care after working in public health for 4 years. I am nervous about what is to come but I was getting bored and needed change. I haven’t started yet, but I figure that if I hate it I can always apply to clinic jobs and leave in a year or so.

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Specializes in Indigenous Health, Virtual Care & Medicine.
On 5/18/2019 at 10:37 PM, andreaest said:

Hi, I realize this is an older post, but I'm just curious about whether you decided to go from community health to bedside.

I'm currently working in a community clinic. I like my job, but I mostly do phone triage, so I often find myself daydreaming about the bedside and direct patient care. I'm a new grad, so I'm hoping I didn't confine myself to one specialty so early in my career.

Thanks for any input!

Hello Andreaest,

I actually did ! I worked as a rural CHN for about 1.5 years and just started my position on a med/surg floor at a large academic centre. It's a steep learning curve since I'm no longer considered a new grad, so I have to overcome the mentality for when I was doing public health (with reg. hours and decent workload).

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Specializes in ICU.
On 9/28/2019 at 8:40 PM, ~Shrek~ said:

I recently got a job in acute care after working in public health for 4 years. I am nervous about what is to come but I was getting bored and needed change. I haven’t started yet, but I figure that if I hate it I can always apply to clinic jobs and leave in a year or so.

trust me when I tell you that after while you will be clawing at the walls to get that boring public health job back.

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Specializes in Indigenous Health, Virtual Care & Medicine.
On 2/17/2020 at 10:12 PM, overtonis said:

trust me when I tell you that after while you will be clawing at the walls to get that boring public health job back.

After 6 months of my med/surg job, there are certainly times when I miss my public health job. However, I feel like I'm learning constantly and it's great to interact with allied health on a frequent basis.

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On 2/17/2020 at 9:12 PM, overtonis said:

trust me when I tell you that after while you will be clawing at the walls to get that boring public health job back.

Well I am back in public health. But I have a promotion and am happy. The issue with acute care wasn’t the hard work. The job I have now is still challenging (not boring) but in a different way. I definitely think public health is my “niche”.

The problem was that in acute care I was being thrown into the wolves and not being given adequate training.

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