When you are in nursing school you get a chance to visit different types of units and learn about areas of nursing you are not familiar with. This is the time when most students start thinking about where they would like to work after graduation.
Floor nurses
This would be those nurses that work general medical-surgical floors. This type of nursing usually involves a heavy patient load (sometimes as many as 8-12), but typically with minimally sick patients. These patients could be your broken leg, infected wound, and minor surgeries. The RN in this case has responsibility for many patients, but has the help of LVNs and aides. The charting is less frequent and these people go home….
Telemetry nurses
The nurses on telemetry floors have almost as many patients sometimes as a floor nurse (4-8), but these patients are just a bit sicker and just a bit more charting. There are usually still LVNs and aides to help on these type units as well though. The types of patients you may find here are those with uncomplicated heart caths, pneumonia, controlled atrial fibrillation, and of course this is where we send a lot of ICU patients that get too well to stay with us 
Labor and Delivery nurses
This is the kind of nurse I always wanted to be but was never given the chance because I don’t have any experience in labor and delivery….Anyway, these nurses have varying patient loads depending on how progressed their patients are in labor. When they have one on the verge of delivery, that one is considered a 1:1, which means, one nurse to one patient. She does not leave that patient until delivery and clean up is done. Some stay and help the mother with breastfeeding if she wishes to do this because getting started right away is very important for the mother and baby bond. Some L&D units may use LVNs and aides, the one where I work does not. Of course I do not want to leave out the post-partum nurses! They are some of the best teachers to new mothers. They get the opportunity to show first time mothers how to care for a new baby and encourage them through the tough times. Some hospitals group post-partum with L&D making it an LDRP (labor delivery recovery and postpartum) unit.
Pediatric nurses
This is one job I know I am not cut out for. Pedi nurses’ staffing ratios are similar to that of floor nurses typically. Many hospitals don’t use LVNs or aides in pediatrics either, so these nurses stay busy. With pedi patients, parents are allowed, and in most cases required to stay with their child, so the parents perform much of the care of the child themselves (however, when I was in school I took care of an 8 month old whose mother would go out with her friends and be gone all night and leave the baby alone!).
ICU nurses
Of course I am somewhat biased here, being an ICU nurse myself, but many of these nurses truly are extraordinary. ICU nurses have lower patient to nurse ratio because of the critical conditions of those we care for. The typical ratio is 2:1, two patients to every nurse. We do have 1:1 patients frequently that will keep one nurse as busy as if they were caring for 3 patients. We are required to chart more frequently, at least every two hours. There is a higher level of stress in the ICU due to grave illnesses and dealing with family distress often. Where I work we do not have LVNs or aides to help, so we perform total care on our patients. I do like this method, because I know what meds they have and when they got them and what their backside looks like and what they ate or didn’t eat for lunch.
OR nurses
I really don’t know much about these nurses. We rarely ever see them, and in ICU it is typically not a good thing when an OR nurse is the one bringing your patient back from the OR because it could only mean one of two things, either they were too sick to go to recovery or they were coding in the OR and were rushed back to the unit so as not to count against the surgeon’s statistics…Either way, we prefer not to see them I know they do wonderful things in the OR and have to deal with the wrath of surgeons, so for this I commend them. BTW, you can read about what it takes to be a good surgical nurse from our very own Dr. Rachael Keilin:Surgical nursing tips.
ER nurses
- These nurses are the bane of an ICU nurse’s existence…Ok, I am just teasing, well a little. ER nurses are another type of special nurse that I could not be. They see the worst of the worst that comes in from trauma to burns to rape. They get very little or no report sometimes on what is headed for their door. They have to be prepared to take on anything that might come in. These nurses care for anywhere from one to several patients at once, depending on levels of acuity. LVNs and aides are used in ERs. I am pretty sure there is not an ER nurse out there that doesn’t have at least one crazy story to tell when they get home. But some of the stuff can be boring too, like my post on flu clinic.
Now I know I left out many other types of nurses, and you are all special in your own way!
