Home health care nurses provide at-home care for patients who are recovering from surgery, accidents, and childbirth. Hospice nurses provide compassionate end-of-life care services in the home or hospice center.
Description
Hospice and home health nurses typically are responsible for the following:
- Work directly with patients and their families, outside of the hospital setting
- Teach patients and their families how to manage their illness or injury
- Evaluate patients, including monitoring and tracking vital signs
- Assess patients’ conditions and determine when consultation is required
- Administer treatment and medications
- Implement palliative care and pain management programs
- Develop day-to-day nursing care plans
- Provide grief counseling to family members of terminally ill patients
Personal qualifications
- Excellent judgment, dependability, conscientious performance
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
- High ethical standards, integrity
- Dependability
- Commitment to patient’s welfare
- Caring and sympathetic
- Emotional stability to cope with human suffering, emergencies, and other stresses
- Physical strength and stamina
- Close attention to detail, scrupulous recordkeeping
Licensing
In all states and the District of Columbia, students must graduate from an approved nursing program and pass a national licensing examination, known as the NCLEX-RN, in order to obtain a nursing license. Nurses may be licensed in more than one state, either by examination or by the endorsement of a license issued by another state.
Employment opportunities
- Excellent, ranking among the fastest growing occupations according to the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Employment of home health and hospice nurses is expected to grow much faster than average (increase 27 percent or more) through the year 2014
Salary
Median annual earnings of nurses providing home health care: $48,990 (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, May 2005)
Progression
With experience and good performance, most RNs who begin as home health or hospice nurses, may move into responsible positions. In hospice management or a home health care agency, nurses advance to supervisory and management positions.
Getting there: Your degree programs at MCPHS
- BS Nursing - 32-month Accelerated Program (Boston): full-time, accelerated 32-month program for incoming freshmen or transfer students who do not have a prior baccalaureate degree who wish to become registered nurses
- BS Nursing - 16-month Postbaccalaureate Program (Worcester and Manchester): full-time, accelerated 16-month program for applicants who have met all preprofessional course requirements and who hold a previously earned bachelor’s degree and wish to become registered nurses (Manchester campus program launch: 2007)