This area is the most common area to end up for students who have not chosen a speciality yet, its also one of the best areas for a new graduate nurse to start even though many student nurses do not wish to work here. I have yet to find any student nurses that openly say they want to work on a medical/surgical floor. This reason is multifaceted including the fact that the nursing student has spent most of their student nursing time on a medial surgical floor, as well as the assumed prestige that comes with entering into a more specialized department. If you do end up on a medial surgical floor though do not be concerned that you’ll be any less capable than your peers in other specialities. On the contrary you’ll have abilities and a resilience that many of your peers wish they could have. It will not be uncommon for you to see critical care nurses, and emergency nurses “floated” to a medial-surgical floor only to not know how to “keep up”. This is due to the higher number of patients, and the overall increase in work demand.
The benefits of working on a medical-surgical floor include peers with a less “nurses eat their own” type of attitude making it much easier to connect with your co-workers. Advancement is much easier in medical-surgical specialities and its not uncommon to see nurses with only six months to a year of experience be placed in a “charge nurse” leadership style position. Obviously this will look great on any new nurses resume.
One of the greatest advantages of working on a medical-surgical floor over critical care and emergency is the decrease in acuity on most patients. Now this will be a hot button topic for many nurses and draw many opinions, but generally speaking patients who are placed in a medical-surgical floor are considered more vitally “stable” vs patients in critical care, this greatly increases the margin of error on errors. If you get to work night shift on a medical-surgical floor you have the added bonus of not having to work around the increase traffic and procedures that the day shift has to workaround, this will give you more time to think about your nursing practice and become more comfortable in your new role.
