Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed the medical systems. However, their potential within specialized domains such as nursing remains largely underexplored. In this work, we introduce NurseLLM, the first nursing-specialized LLM tailored for nursing multiple choice question-answering (MCQ) tasks. We develop a multi-stage data generation pipeline to build the first large scale nursing MCQ dataset to train LLMs on a broad spectrum of nursing topics. We further introduce multiple nursing benchmarks to enable rigorous evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NurseLLM outperforms SoTA general-purpose and medical-specialized LLMs of comparable size on different benchmarks, underscoring the importance of a specialized LLM for the nursing domain. Finally, we explore the role of reasoning and multi-agent collaboration systems in nursing, highlighting their promise for future research and applications.