By the year 2020, the United States will face a nursing shortage of 800,000 unfilled registered nursing jobs – and very few of those jobs are in traditional hospital settings. These days, a registered nursing job is as likely to take you into a laboratory or someone's living room as it is to put you at bedside in the recovery room. If you're just starting your career in nursing, or looking to make a change, take a look at some of the non-traditional settings that have registered nursing jobs available.

Home Health Registered Nursing Jobs

Home health care is one of the fastest growing sectors of the nursing profession. As hospitals and insurance companies struggle to lower the costs of delivering care, they've found that providing nursing care in the home makes more than financial sense. Most patients improve faster when they're in the familiar setting of their own home. Registered nursing jobs that involve home health care include geriatric nursing, visiting nurse jobs and community health nursing. Some popular home health registered nursing jobs include:

- Newborn visiting nurses make home calls on new mothers who have just been released from the hospital. They offer suggestions and assess physical and medical needs of both mother and child.

- Visiting chronic care nurses help keep patients at home who only require a few hours of skilled nursing care per day or week. They may change feeding tubes or start intravenous medications, assess medical needs or change dressings after surgery.

- Early intervention nurses work with families who have young children with medical needs at home. An EI nurse can make the difference between keeping a child at home or choosing institutionalization.

Occupational Health Registered Nursing Jobs

Occupational health is a growing field, and there are many different positions for registered nurses within it. An occupational health nurse may do initial assessments and physical examinations on site, assess medical needs if someone is injured on the job site or provide medical information and advice to employees of a company.

Public Health Registered Nursing Jobs

Do you dream of making a difference on a wide scale? Public health nurses are often involved in making policies that affect the population of entire cities and states. Among the options for work available in the public sector for nurses are:

- Clinic nurses do hands on patient care in a clinic setting. Registered nurses and nurse practitioners deliver care and advice to families and patients on nutrition, health, preventive care, birth control and medical care.

- Nurses working for the Department of Health may be involved in infectious disease control, monitoring compliance with health guidelines and consulting on medical policies for hospitals and other medical facilities.

School Nursing Jobs

School nurses work on site to help manage the medical needs of students. These days the school nurse may float from campus to campus, or be assigned to one school. Many schools now offer on site clinics for students, and a nurse working in a school clinic may be a student's primary health contact. They're responsible for doing emergency care, assessing medical needs and providing family contact points for school students.

Hospice Registered Nursing Jobs

Unlike traditional nursing homes, hospices offer round the clock skilled nursing in a homelike setting. Hospice nursing jobs offer the opportunity for a registered nurse to provide a personal touch to severely ill and terminal patients in a less clinical setting. Hospice nurses work under the supervision of doctors, but often have far more autonomy in making medical decisions.

A nursing career opens so many doors that it's impossible to fit them all into a brief overview. For more information on registered nursing jobs and career opportunities, visit the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site.