A reference on nursing, written for the people who do the work and the people who hire them. It covers how the work is organized, how it is regulated, what it pays, what the research says about it, and where the profession came from. It assumes you already know what a shift looks like.
Start here
- The Nursing Process. The five and six step models of clinical reasoning, where they came from, and the argument that they describe novices rather than experts.
- Scope of Practice. What you are legally permitted to do, who decides, and the framework to work through when the practice act is silent.
- Levels of Nursing. Assistant, practical nurse, registered nurse, advanced practice, with an article on each. What actually separates them is the authority to assess.
Becoming a nurse
- Nursing Education. Thirteen articles covering every route: practical nursing, the associate and bachelor's degrees, the accelerated and direct-entry programmes, the bridges, the master's and the two doctorates, plus admissions, accreditation, and the clinical placement bottleneck that caps class sizes.
- The NCLEX. How the adaptive test works, what the 2023 rebuild changed, and why a short test tells you nothing.
- Entry Into Practice and the BSN Requirement. Three educations, one license. The state that mandated the degree, the state that found a way around it, and what hiring practice decided instead.
- How Many Nurses Each State Trains. Federal completions data by state and degree level, and why counting awards overstates the number of new nurses.
- Nursing Scholarships and Loan Repayment. Federal programmes that pay for service, forgiveness through public employment, association awards, and the employer tuition money most nurses never claim.
Careers
- Nursing Careers. Eight articles on the practical decisions: the first job, resumes, interviews, changing specialty, clinical ladders, moving states, leaving the bedside, and coming back.
- Nursing Specialties. How a specialty forms, and why certification is not licensure. More than forty articles, one for each field.
- Nursing Certifications. An article on each specialty credential: eligibility, renewal, what it is worth, and which ones have quietly closed to new applicants.
- Nursing Certification Boards. Who awards which credential, and how to tell an accredited certification from a purchased one.
- What the Letters After a Nurse's Name Mean. Degrees, licences, certifications and honours, what each one is, and the order they belong in.
- Registered Nurse Pay. Average pay crossed six figures on the smallest raise in four years. The percentile spread, the state and metro range, and the same figures adjusted for what a dollar buys.
Practice
- Nursing Diagnosis and Standardized Language. The taxonomy, the six other recognized terminologies, and why working nurses distrust all of them.
- Nursing Theory. Nightingale through Benner, and an honest account of what the grand theories did and did not achieve.
- Nursing Ethics. The 2025 code, conscientious objection, advocacy against your own employer, and moral distress.
- Delegation, Documentation and Liability. What a nurse stays accountable for after handing a task over, why the record decides most disputes, and what personal liability cover actually buys.
- Nurse Midwifery. Three American credentials use the word midwife and they are not the same thing. What separates them, and where the role came from.
Regulation and licensure
- Nurse Practice Acts and Boards of Nursing. How the profession is governed state by state, what boards actually do, and how discipline works.
- State Boards of Nursing Directory. Every board with a checked link, the separate practical nursing boards, the territories, and where to verify a licence free.
- Nurse Licensure Compact. One license, forty states, and the difference between a state that has enacted it and one that has switched it on.
- Licensure by Endorsement. Getting licensed in the eleven jurisdictions the compact does not reach. Endorsement is not reciprocity, and boards do refuse.
- Nurse Practitioner Practice Authority. Full, reduced and restricted, which states are in each group, and the things practice authority does not decide.
- Collaborative Practice Agreements. What goes in one, what chart review and ratios actually require, and why the physician's signature has a price.
- Continuing Education Requirements. What a contact hour is, who has to accredit a course for it to count, the mandatory topics states keep adding, and where hours come free.
- Peer Assistance and Licence Trouble. Treatment instead of public discipline, what entering a monitoring programme commits you to, and what to do when a board writes to you.
Nursing by state
- Nursing by State. An article for each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia: the board and how to reach it, compact membership, practice authority, where nurses train, and what the local market looks like.
Where the work happens
- Critical Access Hospitals. The federal designation behind most small rural hospitals, and why nursing in one is generalist work.
- Rural and Frontier Nursing. Range instead of depth, transfer as a constant, and treating people you will see in the grocery store that evening.
- Indian Health Service and Tribal Nursing. Federal, tribal and urban facilities are three different employers, and only one of them takes a license from any state.
- Military and Federal Nursing. The armed forces, Veterans Affairs, the Public Health Service and the federal prisons. One state licence works everywhere, pay is set by schedule rather than negotiated, and the education support is the largest available to nurses.
Ways of working
- Travel Nursing. Thirteen-week contracts through an agency. A section of eleven articles: the history from 1917 to the 2022 boom, pay packages, taxes and the tax home, contracts, housing, agencies, licensing, crisis and strike work, getting started, what it costs an employer, and where the assignments actually are.
- Per Diem Nursing. Shift-by-shift work at a premium rate with nothing else attached. A section of seven articles: the history from the private duty registries onward, pay, employment status, scheduling, shift apps, float pools, and building a roster.
- Nurse Staffing Agencies. Who employs the nurse, where the margin goes, and the registration and reporting rules states now impose.
- Twelve-Hour Shifts. Three long days became the standard rota by agreement, not imposition. What the evidence actually shows, and why the risk sits in the shifts that run past twelve.
- Nurse Overtime. Which nurses are entitled to premium pay, how hospitals may count a fourteen-day period instead of a week, and where being required to stay is restricted.
Staffing and conditions
- Nurse Staffing and Patient Outcomes. The mortality research, how staffing gets measured, and the four states with mandated ratios.
- Patient Acuity and Staffing Systems. How a tool turns patient scores into a nurse count for the shift, the four ways that goes wrong, and why unions now bargain over it.
- Nursing Home Staffing Requirements. Eight hours of registered nurse cover a day, no minimum hours per resident, and no federal rule possible before 2034.
- Nursing Home Staffing by the Numbers. Payroll records for 14,271 nursing homes: hours per resident, registered nurse coverage and turnover, by state and by who owns the building.
- Workplace Violence in Nursing. Five in six nurses report violence at work in a year, and 42.5 percent say nothing changed after they reported it. What the law requires, and what already binds employers.
- Nurse Workplace Rights. Refusing an unsafe assignment without it becoming abandonment, how safe harbor works where it exists, and how quickly retaliation deadlines expire.
- Nurse Burnout. An occupational phenomenon rather than a personal failing. The current figures, which improved, and why the evidence points at systems rather than resilience.
The workforce
- The Nursing Shortage. Four different problems under one word. A median nurse age of 50, tens of thousands of qualified applicants turned away for want of teachers, and a falling first-time licensing pass rate.
- Nurse Turnover and Retention. Turnover of 17.6 percent, about $60,090 per departure, and better than one new hire in five gone inside a year. Also the reasons nurses give, which are not the ones employers answer.
- The Nurse Faculty Shortage. A gap of $49,288 between teaching and practice, a third of faculty at retirement age, and why the fix takes a decade.
- Internationally Educated Nurses. Credential evaluation, an examination with a 47.3 percent first-time pass rate, visa screening, and a queue nobody controls.
- Nurse Residency Programs. What a year-long structured transition contains, who accredits it, and how to read its retention claims honestly.
- What Patients Say About Nurses. The national patient survey by state, and the ten-point gap between being treated with courtesy and being told something you understood.
- Where the Nursing Numbers Come From. The six sources behind almost every claim about American nursing, what each one counts, and what each one misses.
Hiring nurses
- Hiring Nurses. The employer's side, in eight articles: writing the posting, where candidates come from, interviewing, setting pay, sign-on bonuses and repayment clauses, the metrics worth tracking, credentialing and onboarding, and international recruitment. Filling one post takes 78 days, and more than eight of every ten hires replace someone who left.
- Magnet Recognition. What the designation requires of a hospital, why those requirements move the labour market, and how far the evidence behind it actually goes.
Organised nursing
- Nursing Organizations. Regulators, professional associations, unions, certifying boards and accreditors are five different animals with different powers. Eighteen articles on the major bodies, and how to read a claim from any of them.
- Nursing Unions and Bargaining Units. Who actually represents nurses, why some state associations bargain and others do not, and how a bargaining unit is formed.
- Nurse Strikes and Bargaining. The ten-day notice rule that shapes every hospital strike, what the early 2026 settlements won, and the first contract limits on staffing algorithms.
Reading and listening
- Nursing Journals. The main peer-reviewed titles by field, each with its publisher and serial number, which ones are open access, and how to read the rest without a subscription.
- Nursing Blogs. Blogs by and for nurses, grouped by subject, with every address rechecked. Thirty-three from the original lists had gone entirely.
- Nursing Podcasts and Video Channels. Shows and teaching channels that had a working page when checked, from new graduate support to specialty practice.
History
- History of Nursing. From religious orders to the training schools, registration, segregation, the wars, and the fight over the degree.
- Notable Nurses. More than fifty nurses who shaped the profession, and a few famous names who spent years at the bedside.
- The Cadet Nurse Corps. The 1943 program that paid for nursing school for 124,000 women, barred racial discrimination in the schools that took the money, and never granted its members veteran status.
About this wiki
Articles cite their sources at the foot of the page, and those sources are the primary ones: state boards, federal labor statistics, certifying bodies, professional associations and the research literature. Where a fact is contested inside the profession, the article says so rather than picking a side.