Calling All Nurses for Summer Camp!

Do you look back on your childhood days at camp and wish you could go back? You can — as a camp nurse. Whether your love is sleeping in a tent, whitewater rafting or playing rock-and-roll music, there’s probably a camp out there where you can indulge your passion while practicing your profession.

At summer camp, your potential patients are dropped off for 8 hours, a week, a full month or the entire summer. Once those parents wave goodbye, your job is to stand in for them, dispensing medications (and watching for side effects), bandaging minor injuries and making decisions during a crisis. “Camp nursing allows you to truly practice nursing — treating the human response to injury, illness and life events,” says Linda Erceg, executive director of the Association of Camp Nurses.

Some camps call for more medical expertise than others. A nurse at a day camp in the suburbs has quick access to emergency responders. A nurse at a wilderness camp will have to manage injury and illness independently until the camper can be carried or flown out. Specialty camps for children with chronic diseases, such as diabetes, need nurses who not only know the condition well, but can also educate campers and find the right blend of supervision and encouragement for campers’ self-care routines.

To be successful as a camp nurse, you need to have enough experience to work well without direct supervision because many camp nurses work under standing orders from off-site physicians. Since you’re the camp’s health maven, it helps to be good at multitasking and comfortable making hundreds of decisions a day.

As the resident health expert, camp nurses also handle hygiene and safety issues. You’ll probably be asked your opinion about everything from how often to clean the bathroom to the efficacy of folk remedies for mosquito bites. Your patient counseling might include chats about why a child needs to change their underwear and brush their teeth every day.

Who’s happy as a camp nurse? “It’s the nurse who’s probably comfortable with ants in her toothbrush upon occasion and who thinks the sound of kids is music, not noise,” Erceg says.

Camping for the love of the outdoors, not the money

Camp nursing is likely going to be the lowest-paying position you’ll ever take. At church or special-needs camp, the pay might be zero, and the highest pay Erceg has ever seen is $1,000 a week from a private, for-profit camp.

“Camp nursing is more than dollars in your pocket. You’re going to have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of youth, whether those are campers or young counselors. You have to have a little sense of altruism,” she says.

Common fringe benefits go beyond fresh air and sunshine and include free camp for your own kids (called camperships), reimbursement for the cost of getting to and from the camp, health insurance and membership to the Association of Camp Nurses.

Wilderness nursing requires special skills

Working in a remote setting sounds romantic, but in reality, when you’re in the wilderness you may be so far from the nearest emergency responder that you become 911. If you’re more than an hour from a definitive care facility, get your wilderness EMT certificate or other training from a group like the Wilderness Medical Society, which focuses on healthcare in extreme situations such as mountains, jungles, deserts, caves and marine environments.

The Society offers a 16-hour course, Wilderness Medicine for the Professional Practitioner, emphasizing the critical-thinking skills that a nurse needs to make when there’s no suction on the wall and no other health professionals at her elbow. Erceg says some camps will pick up the cost of wilderness training courses for their nurses.

Consider state licensing

If your camp job will take you across state lines, check out the reciprocity licensing and certification rules of the host state. Most states offer reciprocity, but you have to give yourself and the state time to complete the paperwork and process.

Written by Dona DeZube

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