Newborn Nursery Nurse

Who these nurses care for

Healthy newborns from delivery through discharge — assessment, screening, feeding support.

What the shift actually looks like

Healthy newborns from delivery through discharge — assessment, screening, feeding and parent teaching. Predictable rhythm with sudden escalation if a baby transitions poorly.

Credentials and certifications

Typically required

BLS, NRP

Typical ratio

Typically 1:4 to 1:6

What to specify when you send the req

Whether the nursery is separate from mother/baby and level of transitional care provided.

Why this role is hard to fill

Often the entry point into perinatal nursing, so the candidate pool skews less experienced than L&D.

What candidates ask before accepting

Answering these in the req itself shortens the process considerably, because they are the questions that otherwise surface at offer stage and cause declines: Whether the nursery is separate from mother/baby, transitional care level, and delivery attendance.

Contract or permanent?

Contract for census swings, leave coverage and seasonal surge. Per diem to protect ratios without expanding core FTE. Permanent when the seat is structural. The expensive mistake is running contract labour for eighteen months on a role that was always permanent.

Licensure

Registered nursing is covered by the Nurse Licensure Compact in most of the country, so a multistate license lets a nurse work across member states without a new application. Thirteen jurisdictions sit outside it — Alaska, California, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands — and in those markets every out-of-state nurse needs a single-state license first. Those are the markets where reqs stay open longest.

How we work this req

Every candidate is spoken to before you see them, with licensure for your state, certifications and unit-specific competency confirmed before submittal. We screen to the credential the unit actually needs rather than the title on the posting. Rates sit inside the ranges on our published cost breakdown.