[liz66]

I am a nurse manager in a rural hospital in maine. I have pedi patients on my unit (about 5 per month). I am looking for help in devoping a strategy for training new pedi nurses and keeping the ones I have competent, given our low volume. Any ideas would be appreciated.

[RealNurseWitch]

I can share with you my experience. I'm not a nurse manager, but I am a staff nurse working on a floor very similar to yours, except we perhaps have a SLIGHTLY larger volume of peds patients; maybe 10-12 per month.

Anyway, each month our pediatric doctors hold different classes for the staff nurses, and we even get CE's for those classes. Maybe if you have a good, supportive groups of peds doctors, you could get something like that set up for your nurses?

Also, in helping to "beef up" our competence in pediatric nursing, our peds doctors are actually hoping to hand us nurses more of their patients, and ship less of them out to the larger hospitals. Still though, it seems like the peds patients who are even remotely serious get shipped out, while we keep the ones that are merely "observation" status.

[liz66]

Thanks for the feedback. Are all of the nurses on your floor trained to care for pedi patients? If so, how were they trained?

Originally Posted by RealNurseWitch

I can share with you my experience. I'm not a nurse manager, but I am a staff nurse working on a floor very similar to yours, except we perhaps have a SLIGHTLY larger volume of peds patients; maybe 10-12 per month.

Anyway, each month our pediatric doctors hold different classes for the staff nurses, and we even get CE's for those classes. Maybe if you have a good, supportive groups of peds doctors, you could get something like that set up for your nurses?

Also, in helping to "beef up" our competence in pediatric nursing, our peds doctors are actually hoping to hand us nurses more of their patients, and ship less of them out to the larger hospitals. Still though, it seems like the peds patients who are even remotely serious get shipped out, while we keep the ones that are merely "observation" status.

[RealNurseWitch]

Well, we are all required to take PALS. There are also the monthly classes. Then there are various classes that nurses on our floor are required to take during our initial orientation.

Otherwise, I guess we mostly rely on what we learned in nursing school, about pediatric nursing. And, we rely on the more experienced nurses who have been taking care of these children for a while, to help us. We would probably have more intense training I suppose, if we took care of sicker patients on my floor. I myself WOULD like to have a bit more intense training. However, I feel like the best way to get that would be to go work at the children's hospital.

I hope I've been SOME help. Probably not much.