Nurse Linkup: A Professional Social Network For Nurses

By Amit Chowdhry ● Mar 5, 2007

There are over 3 million registered nurses (RNs) in the U.S. alone and hundreds of thousands more going nursing schools. Yet Nurse Linkup is one of the only social networks out there for this specific demographic. Nurse Linkup has seized the competitive advantage of being the first to market. Now let’s check out what the features of Nurse Linkup include.

Under the profile page, users specify their first and last name, gender, birth date, e-mail, street, city, state, country, zip, and set privacy preferences.

Within the website, there is nurse-related news as well and can be subscribed to via RSS. And there is a tag cloud to display some of the more discussed topics.

There are also specific articles that are plucked from different users or websites and are assigned ratings based on a 5-star scale. Comments are allowed on each news and articles posting.

As I was reading through an article entitled Future Career Paths in Nursing, I saw that one of the users that commented was a recruiter for a certain nursing company called Home Health and Home Hospice.  This proves that Nurse Linkup has a network worthy of interacting within.

There are also forums in which discussions take place.

The most active discussion is entitled Did your nursing education adequately prepare you to start working. Why or why not?

Sometimes there is a huge disconnect between the classroom experience and the actual experience of the workplace. Some professors and instructors have a tendency to value “book knowledge” over hands-on activities while others are advocates of spending more time in the trenches. How prepared were you when the time came to face the real world?

Every user can start their own discussion in the forum and can also maintain a blog and photo albums within the website. There is also an instant messenger application built into the site so you can interact with other members on the site.

I believe that nursing is a field that is very underestimated. By looking at the numbers itself, nursing as a profession constitutes 1% of the U.S. population and in terms of Web 2.0 companies, Nurse Linkup is one of the only niche websites that cater to that market.