Any Army Nurses in the Reserves and Active duty?

Be careful, the Army Nurse Corps eats their young.

1. ANC favors "go to war" skillsets. ER, ICU, OR, CRNA, Med-Surg are your core skill sets you need for a CSH.

2. Unless you're a direct accession with prior clinical experience, you are going to start as a vanilla 66H MedSurg nurse. You will have opportunities to specialize later. If you commit to more time, the Army may also pay for advanced schooling.

3. Typical day for TDA side ANC officer is working your shift in the hospital. Army training is interspersed between shifts. Unless you're PROFIS you won't go to the field much. mTOE side nurses split time between clinical work in the local MTF and Army training. As a line nurse you will go to the field.

4. Career progression usually follows this generic path:
- 2LT - staff nurse
-1LT - staff nurse/specialization
- CPT - staff nurse/CNOIC/special assignments and duties
- MAJ - CNOIC/grad school/advanced practice
- LTC - section chief/advanced practice/advanced leadership/program chief/command staff
- COL - chief nurse/command/senior leadership and staff roles

I was an RN in the Reserves and now active duty CRNA (anesthetist). Enjoyed my time in Reserves, monthly drills and two week annual training (places like Germany, Bolivia, Hawaii, South Dakota, San Francisco area). Active duty paid my way through anesthesia school, daily life doing surgical and obstetric anesthesia. Can be assigned field unit duties, FTXs, and deploy to austere environment. Regular nurses can be in slots that don’t do direct patient care of they like leadership, management, more FORSCOM related stuff.

Cadet Nishimori, I’d say the same thing to you that I’d say to any potential/currently enrolled nursing student. First of all, congratulations on looking at serving your country! I salute you!
Second of all, the saving grace for my ANC & civilian nursing careers were: 1) a sense of humor closely aligned with a sense of irony along with a concept of the “big picture,” as in is this critically important, vs is this “command by crisis?” In the cases when admin/HQ were going down the crisis road, when it wasn’t, it was critical to remain both calm AND willing to speak up in your patients best interests. As nurses, we have an obligation to remind the decision-makers when what they’re proposing as a solution HARMS your patients. Third,, it is essential that you take any/all opportunities to further your education. As an RN & then an NP @ my local VA, after my initial AD ended in ‘73, I was allowed & encouraged to attend in house educational meetings. As an NP we were REQUIRED to attend 3 separate meetings/week that presented pt cases while we were were having either morning coffee or lunch. It was both educational, but even more important, collegial. When you’re discussing &/or presenting cases, it reinforces your research skills, AND also builds strong bonds with your fellow providers, because all too often the discharge plans DID NOT include such basic things as requesting ADL aids (O2, WC, walkers, bedside commodes, diapers, home health aids & follow up RN visits for RX & pt/family teaching). Yep, we nurses used to do all that, but so often plans were interrupted/delayed with sometimes catastrophic results. Fourth, remember when I talked about a sense of humor, irony & perspective? ALL of those things go into being both an RN & an ANC. By the way, go to YouTube for videos on whatever gets you laughing; builds both your immune system & your resilience! Good luck to you & Happy Thanksgiving!

1LT (Join to see) ensure you ask about what PROFIS is and the effect that has on daily life.

A guy in my old reserve unit went to school to be a nurse not through the army then after getting his license he went active duty as a nurse.

Just a heads up. The senior nurse from 6th Brigade stated that the active duty nurse mission has increased from 145 to 185. She said the chances of a nursing cadet going reserves in this climate is almost zero.