Nursing is a career filled with endless personal and professional rewards. If you choose nursing, you are choosing to spend your life helping others, using skills that blend scientific knowledge with compassion and caring. There are few professions that offer such a rewarding combination of high tech and high touch.
Nursing is the nation’s largest health care profession, with 2.6 million registered nurses (RNs), and many more needed in the future. Nurses are the largest single component of any hospital staff – the primary providers of hospital patient care – and, they deliver most of the nation’s nursing home care. They work in a variety of other settings as well. (See nursing opportunities.)
With the aging population growing steadily, there will be no shortage of jobs for nurses well into the future. In most parts of the country, including Maryland, the average age of nurses is growing, meaning that more nurses are retiring, thus furthering the nursing shortage. So, as the current crop of Baby Boomer-age nurses nears retirement, fewer trained nurses are in the pipeline to replace them. This translates into more job opportunities with the potential of higher starting salaries.