Need advice on moving from Peds to Ortho?

[nursejcarrie]

I need some help deciding what I should do. I currently work on a 6 bed Pediatric unit. We were downsized from 12 beds to 6 beds last June. There are many nights when we don't have any Peds patients (the hospital where I work is a small rural community hospital). Most of the time, our shifts consist of getting floated to other floors to do nursing assistant work. When we do have patients, it's usually only one or two and we spend a lot of our shifts on Peds working by ourselves. A job just opened up on Ortho, which is the specialty I worked in my first two years out of school. We were told at our last staff meeting on Peds that it would be three or more YEARS before we could expect to start getting more of the critically ill children in the area. That means a LOT more time floating or using vacation to time to cover the time when I am in call. What would you do? Would you stay on Peds and wait it out? Or would you jump ship to a different specialty area where you know you would get your time in???? SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP!!!