Jobs / Healthcare / 29-1141.01
Acute Care Nurses
Provide advanced nursing care for patients with acute conditions such as heart attacks, respiratory distress syndrome, or shock. May care for pre- and post-operative patients or perform advanced, invasive diagnostic or therapeutic procedures.
- US jobs
- 3,379,720 (SOC 29-1141 group, "Registered Nurses")
- Median wage
- $97,550 a year
- Job family
- Healthcare
Can agents do the work of acute care nurses?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Healthcare:
- Task levelPartialOne benchmark, from early 2025. On Stanford's MedAgentBench, where agents do clinical tasks in a simulated electronic health record, the best recorded model completes 69.7% of tasks (Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2). It has no maintained leaderboard, so newer models are not measured. No benchmark in our collection tests work with patients.
- Project levelPartialOnly adjacent evidence. GDPval includes nurses among its 44 occupations. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons across all occupations. No benchmark in our collection tests clinical work over days, such as managing a patient's care.
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in healthcare, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Discuss illnesses and treatments with patients and family members.
- Diagnose acute or chronic conditions that could result in rapid physiological deterioration or life-threatening instability.
- Perform emergency medical procedures, such as basic cardiac life support (BLS), advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), and other condition-stabilizing interventions.
- Assess urgent and emergent health conditions, using both physiologically and technologically derived data.
- Set up, operate, or monitor invasive equipment and devices, such as colostomy or tracheotomy equipment, mechanical ventilators, catheters, gastrointestinal tubes, and central lines.
- Document data related to patients' care, including assessment results, interventions, medications, patient responses, or treatment changes.
- Administer blood and blood product transfusions or intravenous infusions, monitoring patients for adverse reactions.
- Interpret information obtained from electrocardiograms (EKGs) or radiographs (x-rays).
- Perform administrative duties that facilitate admission, transfer, or discharge of patients.
- Obtain specimens or samples for laboratory work.
- Manage patients' pain relief and sedation by providing pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions, monitoring patients' responses, and changing care plans accordingly.
- Collaborate with members of multidisciplinary health care teams to plan, manage, or assess patient treatments.
Other job titles for this occupation (27)
Acute Care Nurse · Cardiac Interventional Care Nurse · Cardiovascular ICU Nurse (Cardiovascular Intense Care Unit Nurse) · Cardiovascular Surgery Acute Care Nurse Practitioner (Cardiovascular Surgery ACNP) · Charge Nurse · DSU Nurse (Day Surgery Unit Nurse) · MSN (Medical Surgical Nurse) · PCU RN (Progressive Care Unit Registered Nurse) · Staff Nurse · Vascular Access Registered Nurse (Vascular Access RN) · Admission Nurse · Admission Nurse Coordinator · Care Transitions Manager · Care Transitions Nurse · Chronic Condition Nurse · ICU RN (Intensive Care Unit Registered Nurse) · ICU Travel RN (Intensive Care Unit Travel Registered Nurse) · Nurse · PACU RN (Post Anesthesia Care Unit Registered Nurse) · PACU Travel RN (Post Anesthesia Care Unit Travel Registered Nurse) · Pediatric Acute Care Unit Nurse · Post-Op RN (Postoperative Registered Nurse) · Pre-Op RN (Preoperative Registered Nurse) · Progressive Care RN (Progressive Care Registered Nurse) · Screening Unit RN (Screening Unit Registered Nurse) · Step Down RN (Step Down Registered Nurse) · Telemetry RN (Telemetry Registered Nurse)