Originally Posted by ghillbert
Congrats!! Can you tell us some more about how and what you studied, and how you found the test??
NY, I so vehemently disagree with you about nurses understanding ECGs. I did a critical care course for a year, which did include a lot of ECG courses, but most good ICU nurses I know are very familiar with 12 leads - and could certainly explain what each "lead" of the 12 lead means (see Einthoven's triangle). Dawn gave you a great summary of the stuff to learn as a basic requirement for CCRN. The type of MI has huge implications for what adverse effects you can expect of your patient, so it's not just memorization, it needs to be understood.
Thank you! Really, I didn't study to much for the test because I didn't know how to prepare, I couldn't find anyone that had taken it and there is very liitle info out there about it. I mainly had to rely on my experiences of taking care of CCU patients. If you work with cardiac patients regularly then I think passing will not be a problem. I recently took a 12 lead EKG course (my job offered it, check with your nurse educator) and I recommend doing this if you can, if not, make sure you can identify which ares of the heart corresponds to EKG changes (example: II, III, AVF= inferior MI) and what are the expected complications and treatment. I remember having no less than 5 questions related to that alone! So not knowing it could make the difference of passing vs failing. It was heavy on hemodynamics, I got many questions where they gave me a hemodynamic profile (and NO other info about the patient) and you're expected to know what's happening and how to treat those numbers. On some questions, they would give a very detailed picture of what was happening with the patient, and on others they give nothing but the hemodynamic profile. I got several questions about valvular disease -mitral regurgitation & aortic Insufficiency, so know the signs & treaments. Review medications- inotropes, vasodilators, pressors, fibrinolytics. There is a test plan on the AACN website with recommended references, everything that was on that test plan was on the exam.
Also, there were no nursing fluff questions (professional caring & ethics) on the exam, just clinical scenario based questions. And there was a lot of "what would you do first" "what's most important" priority type questions.
You would think that CCRN wold be harder because it covers every body system, but I found CMC harder than the CCRN. On the CCRN, the answers were fairly straight forward, on the CMC they were tricky- it seemed like there were two correct answers so it was harder to narrow down and it took longer to take the exam even though there were less questions than CCRN. The answers just seemed ambiguous and unclear, I felt like I was back in nursing school taking an exam from one of my least favorite instructors (I'm sure everyone can relate to that)!
Not all of the questions were like this, but a good amount were.
Hope that helps
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