There is a myriad of fantastic, rewarding, and life-affirming benefits to dedicating your professional career to helping other people day in and day out – and you will reap the numerous, immeasurable rewards from becoming a nurse.
Of course, some nurses are perfectly fulfilled and happy without choosing a specialism. However, many prefer to into a specific area of nursing that they are particularly interested in and passionate about. So with this in mind, continue reading for a thorough and detailed guide on the growing nursing specialisms for 2022 and beyond, as well as insight on how to choose the right nursing specialism for you.
Nurse Midwife
Contrary to popular belief, there is a whole lot more involved in the daily life of a nurse midwife than just facilitating the safe delivery of a baby and monitoring mother and infant health and welling, which is one reason why becoming a midwife is exceedingly fulfilling and rewarding yet challenging in equal measure.
There are many benefits to consider when thinking about specializing in nursing midwifery, including the following reasons why it is such a wonderful career choice:
- A hands-on and practical job that entails meeting a variety of different people from all walks of life every single week
- A way to apply your professional nursing expertise in a wide range of locations
- A meaningful service and fulfilling passion to which to dedicate your working life
- A great way to learn new nursing skills that can be applied to other areas of nursing and healthcare in general
- Opportunities to move into more senior roles such as team or unit manager, consultant midwife, the director of midwifery services in your region, or head of midwifery
- Chances to specialize within the field of midwifery, such as becoming a mental health midwife, teen pregnancy midwife, post-natal depression midwife, high-risk care midwife, infertility midwife, or a birthing-at-home midwife.
Home-Care Nurse
The beauty of opting to specialize as a home care nurse is that it does not matter whether you are currently a certified nursing assistant, or you have moved into advanced nursing; as long as you have worked as a professional, qualified, and practicing nurse for at least two years, the opportunity to pursue home care nursing is certainly open to you.
The main reasons why you may consider training to become a home care nurse could include:
- A much greater level of flexibility in your job and choosing your working hours and shift patterns
- A huge variety in terms of the kinds of people you come into contact with
- The high level of respect you are afforded by colleagues, peers, and patients alike
- Ongoing professional development on your terms and at your own pace
- Building a stronger and deeper professional connection with the patients whom you treat and care for
- Exposure to different ways of life and other people’s experiences on a deep, empathetic, and personal level
Nurse Educator
If you have been working as a practicing, fully registered nurse for many years now, it may be the case that you feel as if you would like to move into a more academic, less practical, and more research-orientated role.
Should this sound like you, then considering becoming a nurse educator or nurse scholar will present you with an entirely new and different set of challenges and responsibilities in the nursing sector.
By far the best possible course of action should you decide to opt for a career as a nurse educator is to enroll in a prestigious and established Doctor in Nursing program online. What is a DNP in nursing? Essentially, such a rigorous and immersive nursing doctoral degree is much more heavily focused on the research side of being a nurse and all that that entails, and there is a wealth of advantages to be enjoyed when attaining such a doctorate:
- It is the most advanced nursing degree available in the United States and beyond
- This course centers around conducting your own medical research
- You will be front and center to be hired at any medical institution or hospital you choose
- It prepares you for the literal translation of evidence-based research into practice
- It provides you with the tools to conduct innovative research into the areas of nursing in which you are most passionate
Mental Health Nurse
One of the most grueling yet incredibly fascinating nursing specialisms of them all is psychiatric or mental health nursing.
It’s often that nurses who enter this field knew from the start that they wanted to work in the field of mental health, or else shortly moved into mental health nursing from another area after they themselves or even a loved one experienced issues with their emotional health and wellbeing in the past.
These nurses’ unique empathy and connection to their patients serve the sector of mental health nursing well, and there may well be no other mental health professional that is more committed to the cause than ‘frontline’ mental health nurses.
Working in mental health is an incredibly rewarding professional pursuit, and aside from mental health nursing itself, there is a selection of other viable careers in this field. Such career pathways include, but are certainly in no way limited to, the following:
- Psychological Wellbeing Practitioner
- High Intensity Therapist
- Health Psychologist
- Forensic Psychologist
- Mental Health Counsellor
- Family Health Therapist
- Education Mental Health Practitioner
- Counselor
- Children’s Wellbeing Practitioner
- CBT Therapist
- Adult Psychotherapist
- Assistant Psychologist
- Youth Intensive Psychological Practitioner
Pediatrics
Although the various and intense range of duties, roles, and responsibilities of a professional nurse who specializes in pediatrics are far too many to mention, the job role can be summarized simply by stating that a pediatric nurse is responsible for caring for sick and injured children.
Together with a team of other medical professionals, such as health visitors, social workers, doctors, surgeons, physicians, and psychologists, pediatric nurses are absolutely integral to the healthcare system in general – but especially to children and parents.
If you are looking into specializing as a pediatric nurse, it may help you to learn the main duties such nurses are tasked with on a day-to-day basis, and these are typically:
- Supervising junior staff and student nurses in training
- Conversing with parents and guardians
- Obtaining parental or guardian consent to certain medical treatments
- Monitoring children’s blood pressures, pulses, and temperatures on a regular basis
- Taking blood, urine, and other samples from their patients
- Administering medications, infusions, and injections to children as and when required
- Assessing and planning specific requirements in terms of individual children’s care and treatment plans
- Compiling information from individual patients and forming reports on each patient
- Treating and diagnosing children’s illnesses
- Regular monitoring and checking on both the progress and condition of each patient under their care
- Handling emergencies and accidents, especially relating to patients in their care
Geriatrics
Alternatively, another immensely rewarding nursing specialism you could consider – and one which is currently very much in demand both in the United States and internationally – is that of a geriatric nurse.
As a professional and practicing nurse who chooses to specialize in geriatric nursing, you will solely concentrate on treating and caring for older adults of all demographics.
Geriatric nurses can work in various settings and locations, including nursing homes, assisted living communities, and hospitals, and they can even be employed as a home health care nurse. As with any specialist nursing area, when deciding whether specializing in geriatrics is something you would like to head into, it may well be helpful to learn the typical roles and responsibilities involved, which are as follows:
- Helping to prepare individuals for operations, surgical procedures, and even diagnostic tests under the supervision of a senior nurse or doctor
- The evaluation of emergency incidents and situations that require an immediate response and treatment plan
- Assisting individual patients with their daily activities, such as grooming, skincare, toilet requirements, bathing, and dressing
- The provision of intensive and often long-term supporting therapies for individual patients in order to manage and reduce feelings of pain and stress
- Acting immediately on any unusual changes to a patient’s condition or situation and recognizing a bad reaction to or adverse effects from a particular drug or treatment
- The provision of various medications, such as tablets, liquids, capsules, and intravenous fluids, either by IV pumps, injections, or oral administration
Cardiac Nursing
Unfortunately, one of the leading causes of serious, life-threatening medical emergencies and fatalities in the United `States matters relating to the heart, and more specifically, heart disease.
It is for this reason, amongst a host of others, that the demand for cardiac nurses is growing at an exponential rate both in this country and overseas, and therefore choosing to specialize in cardiac nursing may well be a beneficial career option.
If you are someone who is interested in and even passionate about the heart – from preventing heart disease and educating people about heart health to the dangers of certain attributing factors – then take into account these next points explaining the general and typical daily duties of a cardiac nurse:
- Assisting with diagnostic examinations and tests such as electrocardiograms and more
- Educating patients, their close family members, parents, and guardians on the different ways they can help both themselves and their loved ones to prevent the onset of heart disease
- Regularly logging and updating patients’ medical records
- Assisting with all matters pertaining to individual patients’ health and recovery both before and after cardiac heart surgery
- Ensuring complete and constant compliance with all privacy laws relating to patients
- Taking patients into a private room within an emergency room setting and conducting a full physical evaluation
- Diagnosing a range of heart conditions
- Carrying out cardiologist orders to the proverbial letter
- Modifying and adapting a patient’s treatment based on how the patient responds during examinations
- Administering medications
- Monitoring complex machinery and equipment displaying cardio readings from the patient
- Checking, starting, and changing intravenous drips
- Treating individual patients who are suffering from various conditions that affect both the pulmonary and the cardiovascular system
Travel Nurse
Aside from the high levels of reward and fulfillment you experience on an almost day to day basis, one of the biggest advantages of a long career in nursing is that the skills, expertise, and professional knowledge you acquire during your job and education can translate to working in literally any area of the world.
However, if you have no particular aspirations to leave your life in your home country and become a nurse abroad, there is still another option if spending years upon years working in the same hospital or other medical institution doesn’t particularly sound inspiring.
Travel nursing is another growing area of nursing specialism that has seen a huge rise in demand, not least after the effects of the enforced, worldwide lockdowns brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.
Essentially, travel nurses move from nursing job to nursing job by taking out small and short-term contract posts. Therefore, they have an extremely diverse experience when it comes to meeting new people and working in different situations and locations.
Typical activities and situations for a travel nurse change on a daily basis, but there are also some general duties, roles, and responsibilities that contracts normally have in common, which are listed below:
- Performing regular inspections and treatments of wounds
- Closely monitoring an individual patient’s recovery and treatment plan
- Compiling statements and reports for senior nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals
- Continuously ensuring that all equipment they have with them is in good working order, kept well organized, and is sterile
- Being punctual and on time for each and every appointment
- Staying up to date on the latest innovations just like nurses in more traditional hospital settings do
- Always presenting and representing the health sector by remaining professional, courteous, sympathetic, and polite at all times
- Communicating and even building a professional rapport with a patient over the short term to best address the concerns of their illness or treatment plan
- Traveling across the local community and sometimes even further to schools, homes, and workplaces to administer vaccinations and medications and to take blood pressure, pulse, and temperature readings