In the old days it was standard that all new nurses get their feet ‘wet’ by working on a med surg floor for at least a year or so before going into specialty areas. The reason might have seemed legitimate back then because to really learn and become good at basic nursing stuff, like starting IVs, giving blood transfusions, and developing good time management skills, a med surg floor is the place where you will get to see almost every type of sickness and you can learn more ‘nursing’ there in only a few months than during your entire time in nursing school.

That standard is now gone, and I think a lot of the changes have to do with the way that nursing itself has changed. For one thing, med surg nursing is no longer considered to be basic nursing because the patients who are coming into the system are older, sicker, and have multiple comorbidities with newer and deadlier diseases. There are also not enough nurses so you will have higher patient loads, many more drugs to give, and because of new regulations, a LOT more paperwork to do on each patient. So, you can spend your entire shift literally running from one patient to the next just trying to keep up with all that needs to be done, and in most cases, your shift will end and you will not have completed everything that needed to get done.

Many new grads do not do very well on med surg floors these days because it is very different in the real world from the way they teach it in nursing school. The stress level is very high, and because new grads do not yet have the time management skills and have not yet mastered basic nursing techniques, many of them get frustrated and burn out very quickly.

Many hospitals now offer preceptorship programs that you can go into right after you finish school, where they will give you specialized training in that area (emergency room, telemetry, intensive care, etc.), but going this route also has its pros and cons. If, for example, you go into ICU or ER, the learning curve is much steeper because you will frequently be dealing with unstable and critical patients so have to learn an entirely different set of protocols since you will be handling drugs and performing procedures that require much more sohpisticated management and monitoring.

So, the answer to your question is ‘yes’ you do have a choice, but you should be aware that no area in nursing is ‘easy’. No matter which area you go into you’re going to have to learn to do it well, and to become good in your specialty you’re going to have to put time and effort into it. Read more