If you're interested in a nursing career but working in a traditional hospital setting doesn't appeal to you, working as home healthcare nurse might be a appealing to you. As the name suggests, home care nurses provide care for patients in their homes. Practicing in a homecare setting can offer a lot of autonomy. If you enjoy working more independently while being part of a team, home healthcare strikes a perfect balance.
Being a home care nurse is truly a rewarding career. You'll provide on-one-on care to your patients and receive appreciation and recognition for your services. Working as a home care nurse, you'll often provide treatment such as caring for wounds, changing dressings, and administering IV medication, to patients of all ages. Work is typically done in shifts, but you may have control over your hours and schedule, freeing you from the strict structure of traditional hospital nursing.
If you aspire to become a home care nurse, most commonly, you'll require a bachelor's degree in nursing or a similar field. Additional courses, apprenticeship, or similar work experience in a healthcare organization will boost your credentials. Home care nurses earn a median annual wage of $30,000. Not only that, but the job prospects for home care nurses are incredible, with 12 percent growth expected between 2016 and 2026 -- much higher than the average for most careers.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a home care nurse. For example, did you know that they make an average of $14.81 an hour? That's $30,809 a year!
Between 2018 and 2028, the career is expected to grow 12% and produce 371,500 job opportunities across the U.S.
There are certain skills that many home care nurses have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed communication skills, compassion and emotional stability.
When it comes to the most important skills required to be a home care nurse, we found that a lot of resumes listed 16.2% of home care nurses included rn, while 13.2% of resumes included health care, and 10.1% of resumes included patient care. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
When it comes to searching for a job, many search for a key term or phrase. Instead, it might be more helpful to search by industry, as you might be missing jobs that you never thought about in industries that you didn't even think offered positions related to the home care nurse job title. But what industry to start with? Most home care nurses actually find jobs in the health care and professional industries.
If you're interested in becoming a home care nurse, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 29.2% of home care nurses have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 10.0% of home care nurses have master's degrees. Even though some home care nurses have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a home care nurse. When we researched the most common majors for a home care nurse, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or associate degree degrees. Other degrees that we often see on home care nurse resumes include high school diploma degrees or master's degree degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a home care nurse. In fact, many home care nurse jobs require experience in a role such as staff nurse. Meanwhile, many home care nurses also have previous career experience in roles such as registered nurse or licensed practical nurse.
