Popular Non-Bedside Nursing Jobs (RN)

00:01 So hospital nursing jobs may be the first thing you think of when you think of a career as a nurse. But there are so many other nursing jobs out there and the field is constantly evolving and coming up with new avenues to explore as well.

00:14 So that's super cool.

00:15 Do you need to start in the hospital? Heck no. Most people start their nursing career in the hospital because that is where most of the jobs are.

00:24 But if you are not set on working in the hospital, I know plenty of nurses that have launched their very successful nursing careers in the outpatient world, and they're doing remarkably well.

00:36 You may just have to wait a little bit longer in order to find one of those jobs or not be okay with not getting your dream job right away.

00:44 But that's honestly kind of the case across the board in all the specialties.

00:49 So you might as well wait for what you kind of want.

00:52 Here's a few outpatient jobs to kind of consider or start looking into in your nursing career, if you aren't thinking that the hospital life is going to be the life for you. There are a ton of outpatient nursing jobs, like I said, but I have picked, again, some just the more common ones so that we can have a more focused discussion here. So probably the most common is working in like a clinic, an office, an outpatient type of setting.

01:17 Clinic nurses work in offices and perform a ton of education, assessment, and they triage a lot of patients, usually over the phone.

01:26 Here you'll be doing a lot of chatting with people, seeing if do you really need to come into the office, you're answering their questions, you're doing assessments, kind of seeing, again, do you need to come into this office and educating them on all the different aspects of their care.

01:41 You'll take care of some in-office injections and procedures such as wound care, and you may be helping to interpret labs or some other results depending on the state that you live in. This is a great option, if you are looking for something that is pretty low stress, you enjoy routine, and you want that no night shift or holiday life.

02:02 Similar to a clinic nurse, you can also work at any outpatient procedure or residential centers.

02:09 This would include things like outpatient surgery centers, psychiatric centers, outpatient rehab programs and long term care facilities.

02:18 These job responsibilities will vary widely based on where you're working, as will the schedule.

02:25 But they're usually less high stress and more helpful in terms of you can kind of create your own schedule.

02:32 Certainly more flexible than inpatient jobs for nursing.

02:36 School nursing is also quite common where you are assessing school aged humans who try to impale themselves on play equipment or pencils, or they need medication throughout the day, or they come in down with the stomach bug or a broken arm.

02:52 They also coordinate a lot of the safety procedures and policies for the schools and are used as a resource for things like how do we handle a pandemic in school? How do we keep people safe? Some states require additional schooling for this role, where you would have to go get your master's degree. But many don't.

03:10 And this is an awesome option if you enjoy autonomy because you're going to be the only one there. You have a ton of patients for these tiny children who are constantly trying to die, and you want a schedule that will give you time off, like in the summer or around breaks when school is out.

03:25 We also have home health.

03:27 This one is huge and really like unknown.

03:31 I feel like this is when you are traveling to people's homes and providing them with in-home services.

03:36 And this can range from making sure that people have a nurse to visit them to ensure that the house is safe, to optimizing environments, reduce, to reduce falls, and to make sure that they are just doing generally okay.

03:49 Overall kind of a wellness check, you can also be there doing dressing changes, administering IV medications and coordinating when additional resources might need to be brought in for the patient.

03:59 Although it's not the same as home health, we can kind of lump like hospice and palliative care in here as well.

04:07 And those are other outpatient jobs where you're visiting patients, usually in their home and providing measures to just improve their quality of life or provide end of life care.

04:16 This schedule, all of these home health things, the schedule here is awesome because you have a lot of flexibility into when you can kind of go into people's houses.

04:26 So you can kind of choose your schedule, and it requires you to also be fairly autonomous. And so you have to, before you go into this, be comfortable being in some interesting situations where you're going to be the final decision maker.

04:40 But like I said, very flexible.

04:43 Next, we have case managers.

04:45 These are nurses who do like, quite literally as it sounds, they manage patient cases. They help coordinate all the different things that need to happen when a patient is being discharged and going home from the hospital and needs to have follow-ups, new equipment delivered to their house.

05:01 They need to have home meds, the IV pump, all the things.

05:04 They work with outpatient to kind of connect to social workers, to dietitians, to primary care, to the patient, and make sure that that entire network goes together, and they legitimately make, they make magic happen.

05:17 Not all offices or health settings have these wonderful humans, but when they do exist, they are so incredibly helpful.

05:24 Can you tell? I didn't have them at my last job, and I'm still sad about it.

05:28 Ok, good. This would be a lovely career for you if you have some nursing experience because you kind of need to know what's going on, and you are ready for a really big picture job, and you love putting puzzle pieces together because this involves a lot of maneuvering and takes a lot of magic. What else is magic? Being a camp nurse, at least in my head, I have never done this, and it is quite possibly not as glamorous as I imagine it in real life.

05:55 But doesn't it just sound magical? That's why I threw it on the list.

05:58 You were a nurse. You were at camp.

06:00 How cool. Veering back into the very not camp world.

06:04 We have the nurse world of nursing administration, things like being a consultant for insurance companies.

06:13 And you could be a nursing educator.

06:15 You can work as a nurse manager and educator on a unit that like teaches the actual nurses. Or you can focus on something specialized like diabetes education, or you could literally go in and be an educator to future nursing students.

06:27 There's tons of options within the corporate side of nursing, and the world is yours to explore.

06:33 And last but certainly not least, we have flight nurses who wear amazing jumpsuits and walk around like they own the place because they might as well own it. They ride on helicopters and planes and ambulances and fix people while flying through the air.

06:49 You need a ton of different ICU experience in order to do this in the emergency room and the Pedes ICU. And it is incredibly hardcore, but it is so cool, and I'm just really glad that there's people that want to do that because I can't imagine.

07:03 But if you also like are not all about the adventure life where maybe you don't want to be, like shuttling through the world in a tiny cabin while performing lifesaving care.

07:11 Then the next module may be for you.