How to Write a Home Health Nurse Resume (With an Example)

Updated 25 May 2023

Home health nurses are a vital part of medicine, providing quality care to patients in their homes. You can successfully apply for this role by crafting an excellent resume that highlights your relative skills and experience. Whether you're a newly qualified nurse or a practised professional seeking to specialise in a new area, learning how to write an effective home health nurse resume can give you an advantage over other candidates. In this article, we explain what to include in a resume, provide steps for writing a compelling resume, offer a template you can use and share an example.

Key information for a home health nurse resume

A strong home health nurse resume shows potential employers that you have the necessary skills to succeed in a role. You can show your expertise by highlighting your professional experience, providing your nursing licence information and listing your relevant skills. You may wish to include these sections in your resume:

Contact information: Your resume can act as a professional identifier to help employers learn about you. Include your full name, address or state of residency, phone number and email address.
Professional summary: This can be a brief paragraph about your professional experience and skills, including your long-term career goals.
Work experience: List your relevant work experience, including which tasks and responsibilities you undertook in each role and any important achievements you attained.
Education: Your resume typically contains information about your education, your qualifications, where you studied and information about your nursing registration.
Skills: Nursing can be a challenging and rewarding career, and you have likely developed many relevant skills that you can highlight in your resume.
Additional sections: These can outline any awards you've received, professional memberships you've attained or important contacts you've made.

How to write a home health nurse resume

You can use these steps to create a strong resume for home health nursing roles:

1. Tailor your resume to the job description

If you review a job description, you may notice certain repeated words and phrases. By tailoring your resume to focus on these skills or requirements, you can show that you understand the position. You may wish to highlight how you performed these emphasised tasks in your previous roles to contextualise your experience. This may also work well with applicant tracking systems (ATS).

2. Write a relevant professional summary

Professional summaries are only one to three sentences long, and you can replace them with an objective statement sentence if you have less work experience. Your professional summary gives a brief insight into why you're suitable for the role and your related experience. Focus on how you obtained the key skills specified in the job description and examples of how you successfully used them in your prior roles.

3. Focus on relevant employment

Your resume shows where you gained professional experience and how it can help you excel in a home health nurse or regular nursing position. You can list your job title, employer, dates of employment and major tasks with bullet points. If you gained any promotions or awards in these positions, you might wish to highlight these in this section.

4. Include your education and qualifications

In the education section of your resume, you can highlight any relevant training or education that could benefit the role you're applying for. Provide the title of your degree and where you studied, and include any additional training or certificates you obtained. You can also provide your nursing registration details in this section.

5. Highlight your skills

After sharing your experience and education, you can list the relevant skills you've developed. You may wish to include between six and 10 skills, but these can be brief bullet points that link your experience to the job description. Here are some of the key nursing skills you can highlight in your resume:

Communication: Having strong verbal and written communication skills shows employers that you can effectively discuss and explain important diagnoses and instructions to patients and other medical professionals.
Patient assessment: Being able to assess patients' conditions accurately from their homes is important for home health nurses, as they don't have access to hospital equipment.
Critical thinking: Strong critical-thinking skills are valuable when nursing patients who have unusual symptoms or reactions that may require different treatments.
Patient nutrition: Some home care patients may require help to feed themselves. In these cases, it's essential for a nurse to have a good understanding of their patient's nutritional needs.
Wound care: As home health patients don't have access to hospital-grade care, nurses are often required to take care of injuries and pressure ulcers.
Medication administration: While home health nurses don't prescribe medication, they may administer the correct dose at the correct time. Nurses may give medication orally or via injection.
Personal hygiene: It's important for nurses to be mindful of their hygiene and well-being, particularly when working in close proximity to patients. This ensures that vulnerable patients have a lower risk of becoming ill.
Empathy and emotional support: As chronic health conditions and serious injuries can be stressful or traumatic for patients and their families, nurses can benefit from having good emotional support and grief management skills.

6. Add professional contacts

You can list professional contacts or references in your resume, so that potential employers can verify the information. These might be previous employers, managers, colleagues or university professors. List your references with their name, affiliation and contact details.

7. Proofread your resume

After you've finished writing your resume, it's good practice to proofread it carefully to check for any spelling, grammar or punctuation errors. You can use word-processing or online editing applications to help review the document. You can also ask a trusted colleague or friend to read your resume and give feedback to improve clarity or add additional information. This step ensures you send potential employers a clean, professional and accurate resume.

Resume template for home health nurses

You can use this template to make your own resume for various home health nursing roles:

[Full legal name]
[City/suburb and state]
[Phone number]
[Email address]

Professional summary
[Provide an outline of your skills, qualifications, career goals for the position in a few sentences.]

Work experience
[Job title]
[Company name, city, state]
[Dates of employment]

[List around five primary duties using bullet points.]

[Job title]
[Company name, city, state]
[Dates of employment]

[List around three primary duties using bullet points.]

[Job title]
[Company name, city, state]
[Dates of employment]

[List around three primary duties using bullet points.]

Education

[Name of degree]
[Name of school], [year of completion]

Certification and accreditation

[Nurse registration type], [nursing licence number]

[Additional certification]
[Name of certifying organisation], [dates active]

Skills

[Relevant skill]
[Relevant skill]
[Relevant skill]

Example of a home health nurse's resume

Here's an example resume you can refer to when writing your own:

Jane Smith
North Sydney, NSW
0489 367 474
Jane.Smith@email.com

Professional summary
I am a highly motivated and compassionate registered nurse with over a decade of professional experience providing high-quality care to patients in an aged-care living facility and community hospital. I have a proven record of working with a diverse range of patients and understanding their health care needs. I possess excellent communication and interpersonal skills, allowing me to build and maintain relationships with other health care providers and my patients.

Work experience
Registered nurse
Manly Village Senior Living Facility, Manly, NSW
January 2015-Present

Collaborate with physicians to develop individualised treatment plans for each patient
Perform physical examinations on 12 patients every day to observe any changes to their conditions
Monitor patients' vital signs and administer medications according to their prescriptions
Regularly treat patients' wounds to prevent infection
Communicate with patients and family members to answer questions and offer support

Registered nurse
North Sydney Community Hospital
February 2009-December 2014

Cared for 15-20 patients each day by monitoring, recording and evaluating their conditions
Documented medications and procedures to maintain patients' medical records
Maintained a 98% compliance rating over six years with the hospital

Education
Bachelor of Science in Nursing
University of Technology Sydney, 2008

A registered nurse in NSW, #2636484

Certification in CPR and first aid
Red Cross, June 2022