Jobs / Healthcare / 29-1141.04
Clinical Nurse Specialists
Direct nursing staff in the provision of patient care in a clinical practice setting, such as a hospital, hospice, clinic, or home. Ensure adherence to established clinical policies, protocols, regulations, and standards.
- 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 clinical nurse specialists?
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.
- Provide specialized direct and indirect care to inpatients and outpatients within a designated specialty, such as obstetrics, neurology, oncology, or neonatal care.
- Collaborate with other health care professionals and service providers to ensure optimal patient care.
- Read current literature, talk with colleagues, or participate in professional organizations or conferences to keep abreast of developments in nursing.
- Develop, implement, or evaluate standards of nursing practice in specialty area, such as pediatrics, acute care, and geriatrics.
- Maintain departmental policies, procedures, objectives, or infection control standards.
- Instruct nursing staff in areas such as the assessment, development, implementation, and evaluation of disability, illness, management, technology, or resources.
- Develop and maintain departmental policies, procedures, objectives, or patient care standards, based on evidence-based practice guidelines or expert opinion.
- Evaluate the quality and effectiveness of nursing practice or organizational systems.
- Observe, interview, and assess patients to identify care needs.
- Provide coaching and mentoring to other caregivers to help facilitate their professional growth and development.
- Monitor or evaluate medical conditions of patients in collaboration with other health care professionals.
- Provide direct care by performing comprehensive health assessments, developing differential diagnoses, conducting specialized tests, or prescribing medications or treatments.
Other job titles for this occupation (27)
APN (Advanced Practice Nurse) · Board Certified Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS-BC) · CNS (Clinical Nurse Specialist) · Critical Care CNS (Critical Care Clinical Nurse Specialist) · Emergency Clinical Nurse Specialist (Emergency CNS) · ICU CNS (Intensive Care Unit Clinical Nurse Specialist) · Neuroscience Clinical Nurse Specialist (Neuroscience CNS) · Pediatric Clinical Nurse Specialist (Pediatric CNS) · Psychiatric Adult Clinical Nurse Specialist (Psychiatric Adult CNS) · Trauma ICU CNS (Trauma Intensive Care Unit Clinical Nurse Specialist) · Adult Health Clinical Nurse Specialist (Adult Health CNS) · Clinical Ambulatory Nurse · Clinical Medical Surgical Nurse · Clinical Nurse · Clinical Nurse Manager · Clinical Resource Nurse · Clinical Specialist Nurse · Community Health Clinical Nurse Specialist · Gerontological Clinical Nurse Specialist (Gerontological CNS) · Hospitalist NP (Hospitalist Nurse Practitioner) · Infection Preventionist (IP) · NP (Nurse Practitioner) · Oncology Clinical Nurse Specialist (OCNS) · Pediatric Oncology Nurse · Psychiatric Clinical Nurse Specialist (Psychiatric CNS) · Public Health Clinical Nurse Specialist (Public Health CNS) · Quality Management Nurse