Tips for (nervous) OR nurse going into the cath lab please!

Specialties Cardiac

Published

Hello everyone

I have an interview scheduled for a cardiac cath lab and was wondering if anyone could give me some advice or tips please. I am an experienced OR nurse (scrub, circulating and PACU too) and want to branch out and learn new skills. Clearly there are a lot of transferrable skills that you can carry over from the OR to the cath lab - the lab is an operating room in a sense - however I have very little experience specifically in cardiology. My main areas are urology, general, bariatric and vascular (including endo vascular.) I am aware I have tons to learn but has anyone else out there had a similar experience? Did you find the transition manageable? I want a challenge and enjoy pushing myself but I don't want to kill myself in the process. Also I don't understand why cath lab jobs seem to come with so much on call. This seems to be universal and accepted as coming with the territory - but why don't they just employ enough staff so that you're not on call literally half your life? It seems dangerous to me, called out all night and expected to do a full shift the next day with no sleep! This compromises patient safety hugely! You wouldn't expect this in any other area of nursing, why is it considered normal here? I do on call for the OR but certainly not as much as it seems I'll be doing in the lab...seems crazy. Thanks in advance guys! Any help greatly appreciated, I am very apprehensive! x

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Specializes in Cath lab, acute, community.

Okay! Lots to cover! On call is large, in our hospital at least, because we require a senior nurse with each on call call out because the patient is often acutely unwell if they can't wait till the following day or monday, so they need to have completed their advance life support certificate.

Next, if and when you get the job, there is a lot to learn. Like the names and locations of various catheters and wires and when and why they are used, potential complications, doctors preferences etc... your experience in theatres as far as sterility rules etc is useful however.

I have found that those that enjoy the cath lab are people who are nerds (there is a lot of "technical" stuff), people who can tolerate a changing pace very quickly (it can go from very quiet to very fast and urgent in a second), people who can tolerate long slow procedures such as ablations if you do that in your cath lab, and people who are not gossips or drama-queens because the cath lab team often becomes very tight because it's small. Good luck!

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Thank you for your advice. To be honest what you are describing does not sound too dissimilar to regular OR duties, I frequently scrub for long procedures (6-8 hours) wearing lead aprons etc so I don;t think I will struggle with that. I guess it's just the on call. I had my interview yesterday and it was very positive ;) and the on call seems to be manageable from what was discussed.x

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Specializes in Cath Lab, Endovascular, ICU, PP, MS.

I work in the cardiac cath lab and think some of your experience will be helpful. Many of the cath labs are very different in the way they staff from what I have seen. None of the nurses in the cath lab where I work scrub. We have a team of CIS/RCIS staff that scrub the cases. The nurses circulate and monitor. One of the reasons none of the nurses in our cath lab scrub is because we also run a small pre-post area. We are a small team of staff but get A LOT of cath lab experience. We are on call every 3rd day and every 3rd weekend. It is a lot of call but we plan on hiring more staff and going to every 4th day and every 4th weekend. The call can get to be a bit much sometimes. I'm not sure how much call other cath lab teams take and would be interested to hear. Our cath lab team is extremely good at what they do and we work together like a well oiled machine when things get hairy. Part of the reason we're so good at what we do is because we are small and get a lot of practice/cases. I was really nervous to work in the cath lab too when I first got the job but it is soooooo worth it. I love every day of it (minus when I have to work in pre-post anyway:yuck:) It was a learning curve for me but I was able to manage.

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Thanks so much Alana211. From what I can understand the reason the on call situation is so extreme is because although the cath lab have quite a few STEMIs they don't get enough of them to warrant staffing the lab 24 hours a day 7 days per week. Unlike a regular emergency/trauma OR which deals with multiple cases e.g stabbings, AAAs, fractured NOFs, lap appendectomies etc, so can have a skeleton staff team overnight. So they have the cath lab staff constantly on standby but they are not needed every night/weekend. I think I would definitely enjoy it though, if I'm fortunate enough to get the job. x

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Specializes in ICU, CCL, Tele, Some Management, TNCC.

I'm recently from ICU to CCL. We are on call one night a week (we run 2 call teams a night) and every 5-6th weekends (again, 2 call teams). We are a fairly busy cath lab with 8 labs running at any given time (2 more being built right now). We have a ton of staff to spread out the call...but its a GIVEN you will work on your weekend on call......recently had 26 hrs of just weekend time. We don't run call teams for just STEMI's...but also cold legs, vascular coilings, lytic therapy, some line placements, fistulagrams (we see to NOT use our IR dept for much more than some neuro coilings and PICCs.....CCL does it ALL). I think your OR experience will be beneficial to you. Some of our staff has no OR experience or ICU experience, so they struggle on two levels (sterile fields/procedure flow etc....and gtts for unstable patients...) Our nurses don't scrub...we circulate and nurse. We are a large group but work awesome together....esp when things get scary. I enjoy the cath lab ;) its a nice mix of procedures with the occasional adrenaline storm hahaha

Good luck and glad your interview went well!

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