As a highly specialized skill set, nursing is in high demand. As such, nurses can make a lucrative career by their full-time work alone, and by supplementing it with a variety of nursing side hustles. For those entrepreneurial spirits, there is seemingly no limit to the possibilities.
Home Health Care
There are certain areas of nursing where per diem work is more abundant. Many specialties within the hospital, such as critical care, emergency, surgery, and telemetry, require specific skill sets that the only nurses who fill in are already trained in that specialty. This is because per diem work comes with the expectation that minimal training is required.
There are however, some areas where skills do translate from one area of nursing to another. This is especially true outside the hospital. For example, adult inpatient nurses can work as a home infusion nurse, or in other home health care work, such as overseeing ancillary nursing staff, doing intensive assessments, and advocating for patients with their providers and insurance carriers.
Home health care is a growing field of opportunity as it benefits the patient by allowing them to maintain quality of life in their home; it can also help reduce the logistical strains on the health care system to provide inpatient care.
Aesthetic Nursing
For nurses with an eye for beauty, aesthetic nursing offers a wealth of opportunities. As technology advances, there are more and more non-surgical procedures with anti-aging and aesthetic benefits. Nurses are increasingly able to perform or assist physicians with such procedures in medical spas and dermatology clinics. Furthermore, often this work is available as part-time or per diem. This allows nurses to build up a clientele through a side hustle that works with their schedule and is generally high-paying. Qualifications and credentialing for work as an aesthetic nurse vary by location, but frequently nurses go through certification programs in order to attract employers for this type of work.
Teaching
Working as adjunct faculty is the side hustle of the teaching world. Many nursing schools offer opportunities to instruct a limited number of courses per semester on a part-time basis. This allows nurses with specialized knowledge or skills to disseminate what they know to the next generation of nurses. There are opportunities for both online and classroom teaching today. Requisites for teaching vary by state, school, and specific courses. For example, many nursing schools require five years of experience in a given specialty or an advanced degree in nursing, in order to teach.
Coaching
Coaching is another growing field for nurses. For coaches who are nurses, they mostly function as health coaches or career coaches to other nurses. In the former role, nurses work with clients to mobilize them in the direction of their own personal and health goals. This is done through motivational interviewing, establishing accountability, goal-setting, and most of all-empowering the client to be experts on their own lives and bodies.
This role does not involve medical oversight and instead draws on the nursing skill of patient education combined with the holistic approach to patients that is fundamental to nursing. Nurse career coaches are often experienced and successful nurses who have built lucrative and fulfilling careers in nursing and coach other nurses or aspiring nurses to do the same.
Legal Nurse Consultants
Legal nurse consultants (LNCs) serve as expert nurses that work in medical-legal matters. LNCs are usually experienced nurses that can address technical matters specific to nursing, which a layperson may not know. They may work in law offices, HMOs, hospitals, risk management, workers’ compensation, and so on.
The legal nurse consultant utilizes their clinical and logistical expertise to extrapolate or clarify matters related to medical-legal cases. There are many full-time legal nurse consultants but it is incredibly valuable as a side hustle because it allows the nurse the opportunity to simultaneously work clinically, honing expertise and skills, while contributing the value of such real-time experience to their work in legal matters.
Nursing is a growing field for many reasons, not the least of which is that it offers a multitude of avenues by which to obtain a high income and a fulfilling career. For the nurse who wants to branch out beyond what they specialize in full time, there is certainly no lack of side hustles in nursing for them to explore.
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