8 unique nursing careers you didn't know existed

There are a thousand nursing specialties out there, but most people only know of a handful. If you want to choose nursing as your career, but you want to do something a little different than working in a hospital or office setting, then you might want to consider a few of these more obscure nursing positions. Think outside the hospital!

1. Legal Nursing Consultant

If you have an interest in law as well as nursing, you could consider becoming certified as an LNC. You’ll work with lawsuits and worker’s comp cases, or as a sort of in-house medical expert as the go-to on terminology, medical practices, and health care. Certification isn’t always required, but it will certainly give you a boost.

2. Forensic Nursing

You’ll still be treating patients and dressing wounds, but you’ll also be assessing patients to determine whether or not a crime has been committed and collecting evidence. This job might even involve identifying bodies. It’s likely not as glamorous as T.V. shows make it out to be, but still very cool, and you get to play your part in making sure justice is served.

3. Cruise Ship Nursing

See the world, sail the seas, and live your life where others only vacation. All you have to do is treat the thousands of patients sailing around with you at any given time. The workload is diverse, the people are from all over, the perks are undeniable: you’ll get free room and board plus good vacation time after long stretches of work.

4. Camp Nursing

Love the great outdoors? Were you a camp kid back in the day? Sign up to be the nurse at a summer or wilderness camp to deal with sick campers. You won’t make that much money, comparatively speaking, but you will lead a much more relaxed life (and work life) and get to work with kids, if that's your preference.

5. Flight/Transport Nursing

Rural areas don’t have the kinds of medical resources for emergencies that larger metropolitan areas do. The long ambulance rides or helicopter flights often require a nurse to ride along to help. Get yourself certified as a CFRN (Certified Flight Registered Nurse) for this always exciting gig. And bonus: the money is pretty great!

6. Nursing Informatics

Want to be a nurse but find that you also really love geeking out about technology? You could work in large medical facilities or private consulting firms, keeping up with the newest technology to optimize patient care.

7. Parish Nursing

Bring your spirituality and faith to work as a parish nurse, where you can help your patients improve their physical health as well as their overall spiritual well-being. This can be a very rewarding career for the right kind of nurse who wants to serve a specific community. This type of nursing is most common in Christian denominations, but others are starting to pop up as well.

8. Hyperbaric Nursing

This field is in surprisingly high demand. Hyperbaric nurses treat patients in decompression chambers to relieve multiple kinds of very serious symptoms. You’ll work with cutting-edge treatments and be at the forefront of helping with this growing medical practice, but this job does come with some physical risk, given how much exposure you’ll have to the decompression chambers.