Trouble with acute care after school nursing?

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Hello,

I am looking into school nursing but wanted to know if it was challenging getting a job after being a school nurse. If I wanted to go back to a more acute-care setting (hospital, outpt surgery, etc) after working as a school nurse, would it be hard to get a job since i hadn't used bedside skills in a while?

Thanks!

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Specializes in School Nurse.

Skills are skills. Each nursing specialty has different skills. Working in the ER is different from working in the PICU or a burn center. School nursing is no different. I do more medical history stuff as a school nurse then I ever did working in a hospital. While I don't place IVs anymore, I've got epipens and occasionally diastat orders to deal with. I can't recall ever having to give an inhaler in the hospital (we had respiratory specialists for that).

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I've never had any trouble, even after working as a school nurse and then staying home with my kids I was hired in the OR which I hated and left and then later went back to med-surg without any problems. It may depend on the area but here no problem. You will gain a lot of skills in school nursing such as independence, critical thinking, emergency care, lots of case management/social work type stuff, teaching, etc that will always help when trying to find another job.

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Specializes in ICU/community health/school nursing.

Assuming you had a year's worth (or whatever the magic number is in your town) of acute care, you shouldn't have a problem. You might indeed find it enjoyable to have a fixed series of protocols and docs to bounce things off of versus wingin' it a lot of the time!

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Specializes in IMC, school nursing.

Trust me, after any other nursing you will never want to go back to acute care. It really is the armpit of nursing, even worse than LTC in my opinion.

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