9 Work from Home Nursing Jobs to Consider

Can there really be any such thing as a nursing job that can be done from home, or remotely? At the moment, with so many people opting to work from home, or having to because it is unsafe to return to their offices and other workplaces, it seems like a wonderful idea, but it also seems rather farfetched - after all, nursing is a 'hands on' kind of job that will require the nurse to actually be there with the patient, not at home typing on a computer. 

Yet although the ideal of working from home for a nurse might not be something you even consider because it just sounds so impossible, the truth is there are such jobs. Or at least, there are jobs that allow the nurse, who has been through their nurse practitioner programs to be home based, even if they do still need to leave the house to perform their duties. This means not being tied into working for one particular hospital or clinic and having a lot more freedom. It's the ideal compromise between having a career for life, and still being able to work in a way that suits you. 

Thanks to today's advances in technology including incredibly fast broadband speeds and the ability to use video conferencing whenever required, many different industries are choosing to allow their workers to be remote when they are working, and some of these jobs can be ideal for nurses who are looking for additional work to supplement their current, hospital based shifts, or for nurses who are trying to maintain the best work life balance they can. There are actually many more jobs than you might expect when it comes to those a nurse can do from home, and here are some of them to think about. 

Nurse Health Coach 

Once you have completed your nurse practitioner programs and you are a fully qualified nurse, you will need to make a decision about how you are going to use your qualifications to enhance your career. If you don't like the idea of working in a hospital, or you would prefer to do this on a part time basis so you can use your skills in other ways too, home based ways, then becoming a nurse health coach could be perfect for you. 

If you have chosen to become a nurse it will be because, among other things, you want to help people as much as you can. You will want to be able to provide them with the best healthcare possible, thanks to the training you received on your nurse practitioner programs. However, sometimes working in a hospital or clinic can feel a lot more like 'sick care' instead of healthcare because you are treating someone who is already unwell. If you would prefer to try to prevent these illnesses from happening in the first place, being a nurse health coach is the right path to consider. When you are a nurse health coach, you will be working to improve a patient's overall health and wellness. This is done through suggesting lifestyle changes and a better diet. In other words, you are literally someone's health coach, someone they can go to when they need advice and are having a bad day, and someone who can create the perfect health plan so that people are much less prone to getting sick in the first place. 

Nurse Advocate 

Working in nurse practitioner programs will give you a big insight into the nursing profession, and will allow you not just to train in nursing, but to understand exactly what it is you need to do to make yourself happy in your career. Nurse advocate (which may also be known as clinical nurse advocate, mental health care advocate, care advocate, or nurse clinician, among other terms) is someone who offers patients more than 'just' care taking. 

The job of a nurse advocate is to explain all the details of someone's condition and their treatment, ensuring they completely understand what is happening and how their illness is going to affect their life. Typical jobs for a nurse advocate include:

• Explaining bills and guiding on bill payment

• Helping with insurance claims and issues 

• Educating patients about their illness

• Offering information on available treatment options 

Once you have gone through your nurse practitioner programs and have been working as an RN for some time, you may be able to switch to being a nurse advocate. This is the ideal way to do things, as although you could be a nurse advocate without having been a nurse, if you do have nursing experience you will be able to help your patients much more; you will have an indepth knowledge that others won't have. 

This job is one that can be done from home if required, as you will be able to speak to patients online or on the phone. Alternatively, you can travel to different hospitals and clinics within your area in order to see patients face to face. The choice will be down to you and the hospitals you're working for, as well as considering what the patient wants. 

Nursing Informatics 

Nursing informatics are able to work from home if they desire (or if the company they are working for allows), and they are among the highest paid nursing staff in the country. These two factors can mean that, after studying in nursing practitioner programs and working in hospitals treating patients for enough time to gain a good amount of experience, some nurses might want to become nursing informatics in order to give themselves a good quality of life. This will depend on the nurse, as some will, of course, prefer to be with their patients and treat them, no matter what the temptations of better pay and home based working might be. 

Nursing informatics is a relatively new branch of nursing, but it is one that is becoming more and more necessary. Much of the role of a nursing informatic revolves around analytics, technical implementation, and project management. If you are a nurse who is extremely organized and who is interested in analytics and computing, you could have the perfect combination of skills and interests to ensure you do well in this new and exciting role. 

The nursing informatic will use technology to maintain patient data and their records, and this technology will need to be checked over, updated, developed, and customized. This is what a nurse informatic will be doing in their day to day working life. 

Telephone Triage Nurse 

Being a telephone triage nurse is an ideal way for qualified nurses who have worked hard through their nurse practitioner programs to help people from their own homes. Many people call medical facilities in order to ask straightforward questions; they don't want to have to go to the hospital or clinic to speak to someone, but they do need an answer to whatever it is that's troubling them. 

This is where the telephone triage nurse can be of help. They can answer the calls of the people with minor questions and complaints and give them the information they need. They can tell the patient whether or not they need to come straight to the hospital, or if they should make an appointment with their own doctor, for example. 

Busy medical facilities will often employ a telephone triage nurse who can help patients quickly and easily, only passing on the most urgent cases to the hospital itself. In this way, the medical staff on site will be able to optimize their time, and since the telephone triage nurse will be fully trained and qualified, they will be able to assess symptoms and truly analyze what the patient is saying to them before making any kind of decision as to what should happen next. 

Remote Nurse Case Managers 

Did you know that nursing case management can be done remotely if required? This might be known as being a field case manager, or a clinic nurse case manager. Whatever you call it, the job is certainly an important one, and one that is becoming more and more necessary. 

A nurse can manager is in charge of creating the ultimate care plan for their patients. The care plan will include making various medical appointments, scheduling surgeries, following up on aftercare, ensuring medication is provided and understood by the patient, and more. A nurse case manager is similar to a personal assistant for patients who can then rely on the nurse case manager to tell them exactly what they need to do, and to organize the more confusing and potentially problematic parts of their healthcare situation. This is clearly a job that can be done from home, as the nurse case manager is someone who essentially liaises between the hospital and the patient, as well as outpatient clinics. 

Nurse Coders 

Being a nurse coder might sound complicated, but once you have studied your nurse practitioner programs and gained your qualifications and experience, being a nurse coder is not as impenetrable as you might think. In fact, it is a highly necessary position, and one that can very easily be done from home. 

The nurse coder is responsible for creating billing forms for patients which will then need to be processed by Medicare. Of course, being a nurse is not a prerequisite for being a nurse coder, and those who have a penchant for numbers and being extremely organized and thorough will do well in this role, but if you are a nurse first, you will have a much better understanding of the process. 

The billing for clinical care can be very nuanced, and having a deep understanding of this will be extremely useful, and will allow the nurse coder to ensure they are inputting exactly the right information, meaning there will be fewer errors and everything can run much more smoothly. 

Freelance Nurse Writer 

Medical writing is a highly paid field to work in, and it requires those who undertake the work to be medical professionals, and that includes nurses who have carried out nurse practitioner programs. The more experience you have the better, as in order to be able to write accurately and effectively, you will need to have a good understanding of medical terms, medication, side effects, patient trauma, and much more. 

Nurse writers contribute to nursing journals, medical publications, websites, packaging and inserts for medication, training courses, instruction manuals, and much more. They might work on a project by project basis, or they might have a contract with a specific healthcare organization, publication, pharmaceutical company, or university. 

If this sounds like an appealing way to earn either some extra money or as a full time career, you will need to have nursing experience but also writing experience to prove to potential clients that you are going to be able to help them. To start with, you can create a nursing blog. This will give you plenty of practice and will be a showcase for your skills. 

Clinical Research Associate 

Clinical research associates are the people who are there to manage each different aspect of a research project, putting them all together in the end to create a whole. This will include creating a budget, monitoring the study, and of course, reporting the findings. In order to do this job, you will need to have completed nurse practitioner programs and be a qualified, experienced nurse. Many employers will also be looking for people with experience in research, so this position is only going to be open to a select few people who have all of these skills together. 

Independent Nurse Recruiter 

Recruiters are people who find the right people for specific roles that need to be filled. Nurse recruiters do the same job, but they are looking specifically for nurses to fill clinical roles. This is a role that can certainly be done from home, and it can be done on a part time basis to begin with (and can continue in this form unless you decide to change roles entirely and go into recruitment full time). 

As a nurse, you will be working with a number of potential candidates for all kinds of different roles. If you sign up to be a nurse recruiter, you will be given briefs of different jobs that need to be filled, and you can speak to your colleagues, the ones you feel are good candidates, to see if they would be interested. You earn a fee if they get the job you put them forward for. Since that fee is often a few thousand dollars, it is definitely worth looking into as a side hustle if nothing else after you have completed your nurse practitioner programs and are working in a clinical role yourself.