I'm hoping some experienced med surg nurses will respond to this. I've repeatedly read on these boards that med surg is the way to go for new grads for at least a year or two before you move into a specialty area. My last clinical instructor told our group that this is foolishness, and that we should apply to hospitals that offer extended preceptorship into a specialty area if we feel pretty certain that that's where we want to be. She said that although you get to see a little of everything on a med surg floor, in her experience the workload and pt ratios on med surg units tend to be more overwhelming than everywhere else and, in her opinion, this isn't the best learning environment for a new grad who's trying to get his/her feet wet. She feels that med-surg nursing isn't necessarily 'beginners turf' as so many people suggest, but that it is its own specialty area and that it can be extremely demanding, especially when it comes to time management. She also said that hospital recruiters who claim a 5:1 med surg ratio are lying, because the ratio is usually 6:1 or higher.
I worked for 6 months in a hospital, first as a tech then as an RN Intern in the ICU. I was sometimes floated to tele and med-surg and I confess I really hated working on the med-surg unit. They told me it would be great experience for me, but it was pretty awful. There were never enough nurses or aides to handle all the patients, and they seemed to always be asking already overburdened nurses to "take one more". Because I was working as an intern, my job was to assist 'as needed' giving priority to the most urgent patient needs as determined by the RNs. Of course, all the nurses would say their pts had urgent needs and they would always be paging me non-stop to come help them do stuff. I hardly had time to go to the bathroom, and even if I took a 15 minute break to eat a quick meal, they were paging me then, too. It was insane! I used to go home at the end of the day feeling like I'd been run over by a bus.
I was thinking of biting the bullet and doing straight med surg for at least 6 months as a new grad, but the experiences I had in the hospital made me realize that med surg is definitely not for me. The ICU and tele units were constantly busy, too, but it was a different kind of busy and definitely nothing like med surg.
