An Interview with Garret Armes of Nurses Lounge

This week’s Q&A is with Garret Armes, co-founder of Nurses Lounge, a professional network for nurses. Nurses Lounge’s mission is to connect every nursing school, association, employer, and over 1,000,000 nurses in the Nurses Lounge.

How many users / nursing organizations are active on Nurses Lounge?

Active users: approx. 18,000 Active orgs: approx. 120

How would you describe your members?

Members range from nursing students, doctorate students, faculty members, chief nursing officers, nurse recruiters and any professional involved in nursing. Our members are professional and career-oriented looking to connect with other nursing professionals and organizations that can help advance their careers.

Who are the most active organizations & members on Nurses Lounge? How are they using your site?

Being an organization-centric network I would say our most active ones are nursing schools such as San Francisco State University, Frontier Nursing University, Duquesne University, Utah Valley University. Some associations include NADONA/LTC, Dermatology Nurses Association, Clinical Nurse Leaders.

What are the most important problems that Nurses Lounge solves?

Nurse Stakeholder organizations lack resources and time to efficiently communicate to the broader nursing profession. By connecting the profession on a single, connected network organization can easily disseminate their news, education, jobs, etc to targeted nurses based on their location, education level, and nursing specialty.

What are a few major success stories?

NADONA/LTC is a large national nursing organization with chapters in almost every state. Instead of spending the time and money on a website with individual pages for each chapter, they decided to use the Nurses Lounge as the most efficient way to connect their organization. We created a Lounge page for each chapter and each chapter president is the admin. The chapters are all tied together and linked to the main national chapter. Now the organization is all tied together and each chapter can easily share meeting news and information with their members.

What’s on the horizon in the next year?

We’re currently making a big push for nurse employers to come on to the network. Our goal is to have over 10k nursing jobs by the end of the summer making us the largest hospital and healthcare facility job board. Hopefully the increase in jobs will increase the number of nurses signing up and in return increase membership.