Working outside my scope of practice?

[Mamabloomer]

I am not sure if I am really working outside my scope of practice, or just my comfort zone. I have worked on multiple different floors and have been pulled to multiple others. I do not mind being pulled, sometimes it is a nice changenof pace, but, where I am being pulled to now is different. I am now a labor nurse and have found myself being pulled to a higher level of care (Level 3 NICU). I am really not comfortable with this pull, I do not feel that I have the advanced training needed to adequately care for these infants. If they are too sick to be under my care on the floor, then shouldn't they be too sick to be under my care in a NICU? To make matters worse, the parents of these babies are not told that a labor nurse is caring for their infant, so you look ignorant when parents ask you about the well being of their baby and you have no idea. If it were my child in the NICU I would be very angry that a basically 'untrained' nurse is caring for my baby.

If something were to happen to an infant under my care (in my control or not), would I be considered outside my scope of practice to where my facility can say that they never told me I could work in there and risk my license?

So am I just belly aching, or is this a valid worry? Any thoughts are appreciated.

[tinyonern]

In the unit I worked in you couldn't even float in unless you had neonatal CPR cert.

[NicuGal, MSN, RN]

We get floats quite often and we always give them the stable gainers and growers and the bigger withdrawal kids that are on a taper. We never would give them a 26 weeker!!! You all need to come up with a float policy that spells that out. Speak to your manager who may then need to speak to the NICU's manager. We were having issues when we went to PICU and they were trying to give us Traumas....talk about an OMG moment!!!

You should also have a resource person. And our floats will tell the parents that they floated over to help out and they will find out the answer to their questions. We have never had a complaint.

[klone, MSN, RN]

In the unit I worked in you couldn't even float in unless you had neonatal CPR cert.

As a labor nurse, I imagine she has NRP cert.

Where I used to work as an L&D nurse, we often had to float to the NICU if they were short staffed. This was also a Level III NICU. They would give us the lowest acuity patients (ones that were older, closest to discharge, generally most stable, not on vents, etc.) but yeah, it was definitely uncomfortable being outside my area of expertise and working with these patients. It's just something we had to accept as part of the job once in a while. It was my experience that the NICU nurses were so protective of "their" babies that they wouldn't DREAM of giving us one of their higher acuity or unstable babies. They barely tolerated our presence as it was.