Telemetry unit

I am currently working on a telemetry floor and i love it. Be sure to check, though... there are lots of "telemetry floors"- most are cardiac but there are lots of med-surg units who use telemetry and i have actually worked on a respiratory telemetry floor. Ask questions!
My unit is a post-cath/angio floor, mostly, although we get lots of chest pain too.

Yes, we have only cardiac pts (most of the time- you know how that goes!) who come in thru the ER with c/o chest pain, they are admitted, taken thru the usual tests, stented, if possible, CABG if not and often, the complaints are found to be GI so off to surgery for a gallbladder removal or the like. I do like the patients alot on this kind of floor. Most of our pts are 30's to 60's, up ad lib and mostly self care. There is lots of patient teaching to be done so it's nice to have pts who can understand the education and still have a desire to actually use the education; i like that.
Like i said, lots of our pts have a cardiac cath in the cath lab, a stent or two placed, then after recovery, come back to the floor to us and usually just spend one night in the hospital after that.
Its a floor with a fast turn-over rate though- that can overwelming at times to some. We have a 1:6 nurse patient ratio so i might come on duty to 5 pts, discharge 2 and get 3 admissions during my shift. MOST shifts go smoothly, as with any job i've ever had, but then there are days :angryfire

I do love being a nurse no matter what my 8 hrs bring me though!

I am a new grad and have started on a tele floor. We do get all sorts of patients besides the cardiac ones. Sometimes it can be quite overwhelming althought I feel that I am learning alot. Some times it seems more like a step down unit with the acuity of the patients. I am in my 7th week and just started taking 5 patients which keeps me very busy, sometimes too much so... I am trying the best that I can. ALthough sometimes I think I should have started out on the general Med Surge floor. Eventually I would like to work ICU or work L&D or mother baby. I wanted to get my floor experience firtst. So it depends on the day whether or not I like my job.... Thats the only answer I can give you at this time

I worked for many years on a 29-bed ICU stepdown unit. The hospital also had a 29-bed CCU stepdown unit on the floor above us. I guess one of the best ways to characterize it was that it was a kind of way station for patients either coming out of ICU or going into it. The ICU was right next to our unit. We had two interconnecting doors so the ICU nurses and us were often going back and forth between the two units looking for equipment or a quick consult with another nurse. If we were ever quiet we would saunter over to ICU to see if they needed a couple of extra hands. We often got patients that the doctors wanted "watched" more closely than on a regular medical floor, so they came to stepdown and were put on telemetry. My unit had a lot of respiratory patients, so we had a fair number of patients who had trachs or ET tubes and were on ventilators. We also got a lot of the post-op thoracotomy patients and therefore chest tubes. We got a lot of the lung CA patients with chest tubes because the manager on the medical unit was able to convince someone that they belonged on a stepdown. We had a couple of general surgeons who performed some big abdominal surgeries on patients that we often got post-op. These patients had a multitude of tubes coming out of everywhere you can think of. It was a real trick to learn to work around all the tubes and not accidentally pull one out! We often got newly admitted stroke patients who needed close monitoring. We did a lot of turning and repositing of patients, a very basic nursing procedure. When I worked night shift we did a certain number of the morning baths on patients who didn't care about the time of day in order to help out the day staff. We were all required to take the EKG class and know how to read and interpret rhythms on the monitor. We each took a half hour stint a couple of times throughout our shift to sit at the telemetry monitors and watch them. We treated patients having PVCs, short runs of V-Tach or bradycardia. If their problems leaned more toward cardiac they were transferred up to the CCU stepdown. We had code blues more than a regular medical unit, but not as frequently as you would think. The cardiac stepdown had more code blues than we did--and I was always impressed that a lot of people coded up there in the bathrooms. It was a wonderful job and I worked with wonderful nurses. We all worked together as a team to get everything done. It is harder work than a regular medical unit--you will never sit down.

I'm externing on a tele unit, where it is a big mix between med-surg, cardiac, renal, liver, basically sick people who the doctors want to monitor more closely.

We get the rule out chest pains, the ETOH withdrawals, the renal failure (the nephrologist in town won't admit his patients to any other floor it seems...), geriatirc & other compromised post-ops and anything else they throw our way if they need a bed. We also have a step-down unit that handles more acute cases than us, but not so bad as to need the unit (ICU), plus they get post-CABGs and more. It is incredibly interesting work as you see a wide variety of cases on our floor, but it is stressful and busy. I worked this weekend and we had several transfers to the unit of people on the verge of coding, or post-code.

Overall I really love it, it is a challenge, but we have a great group of folks working and the docs for the most part are great as well.

Just my $0.04 (inflation...)
Tom