I would say to you to have at least a one to two year med surg experience as you will be called upon to handle medical issues a patient might have while pregnant. In general a Labor and Delivery orientation takes at the very minimum three to four months. Remember a L&D nurse will need to learn how to care for a laboring patient, a immediate newborn, be a Recovery Room nurse, and learn how to both circulate and scrub in the OR, as well as use ER skills to triage patients and most L& D units have a fair amount of High Risk patients too. It is a lot to learn and you will need to qualify for not only BCLS but ACLS and Newborn resuscitation also. You will need to learn how to read fetal monitoring strips.. After orientation never hesitate to ask for help. remember you are responsible for two lives, the one outside and the one inside. It is also a unique specialty that has and encourages family participation and even in the OR your patient is awake with her SO and you must be cognizant of that. L&D is not easy but it is rewarding and varies day to day. It takes a good couple of years to feel confident, and I would encourage taking OBS certification too. Be comfortable in patient/family teaching you will be doing a lot of it as a woman transitions to new Mom. Good Luck, L& D is a great unit to work.
You can find great Residency programs at most of the larger hospitals right out of school. I would suggest trying to get an externship in L&D your last semester of nursing school. It's a great way to see what life is really like & have a nurse as a mentor.
You do not need med surg experience to be a labor and delivery nurse. I do both Labor And Delivery and NICU. I started in labor and delivery, and I can tell you that almost none of the nurses that I have worked with in labor and delivery myself included started with MedSurg experience. After graduating nursing school, you’ll be on orientation for probably six months.
You can start on an l&d unit right after nursing school, especially if you're flexible with where you're willing to live and work. You do not need to start in Medsurg.
I started in L&D as a new grad in 2015. Sure, there’s probably benefits of doing med surg first, but if you know you want to do OB, go for it! Many hospitals have new grad programs. I am in AZ, at a high risk teaching hospital, and we have lots of new grads!
1 year
I went straight into it from nursing school. Loved it for awhile and then tired of the frenetic pace and all the call and went to an ambulatory surgery center. Don’t miss it at all (except the babies)!
Find a hospital that offers a new L&D orientation (for someone who is a new grad or new to OB). You want a minimum of 12 wks but 24 would be best. The bigger the unit the better (you will have more varied experiences). Don't expect to know it all or even be comfortable at the end of the orientation. If you feel that way, you are too self confident. L&D is very much like the ED. Things can be smooth but then they go down the drain fast and you need to be able to deal with it quickly. I've been doing this for 40+ years, worked at large, high risk hospitals with lots of deliveries, yet there are still things I've never seen. And patients have more and more co-morbidities which complicate things. Not everything is positive, so you need to know how to deal with poor outcomes, yet that can be very rewarding in and of itself. It took me years to feel like I could deal with most situations. Just keep going to seminars and learning. I would never stay with it, except I LOVE it and feel like I can make a difference for my patients.
That varies of course depending on the hospital. You really need a good orientation and not be rushed to really be proficient and SAFE. To have a good base, I would say 6 months to a year. Most places don’t give you no where near that . It is a highly specialized and busy field. What I’ve seen is that some places hire new nurses because they are short staffed, give them their brief training and let you go. Do your research, ask questions and try for an internship if possible. If you are a nurse with some experience, it still is a highly specialized field. It’s not something you learn in a few weeks.
