What is this job like?

Sorry no one got back to you. Hi! I'm an infusion nurse. I work on an IV Team @ a 400 bed hospital. The IV team nurses are utilized in our facility for outpatient infusion services (usually we give blood products, IV iG, certain injections), start difficult (or every) IV in the hospital--except ICU or ER (they usually have decent skills). Also, our IV team is responsible for insertion of PICCs and PICC line dressing changes for the whole hospital. All that keeps us quite busy. We work 10 hour shifts. Charting is minimal and we enter all the charges for our services. What I like about the job is that it's a specialized skill and we generally get in and get right out. We aren't stuck with the same patients for 12 hours, we see tons of people in a day for 30 minutes or less when we are putting in IVs. Basically, it's the ideal job in my opinion for that fact. Sometimes it's frustrating starting IVs on the floors when we are busy with other things--especially when you go into the room and see big, fat veins. I also do home health care IV infusions on my days off from time to time. The skills are transferable and similar. Once you add IV skills or PICC skills, it's another specialty area for the resume. These skills are quite marketable. Just be in good shape, you do a lot of walking with this job--but it's rewarding to get the veins that are difficult.

During 2008 I worked part-time for a Health care services- Home Infusion Co. I worked independently educating, maintained various IV devices, and monitored pts IV therapies. I loved it! Unfortunately I could not trust that I would get consistent hrs and remained in the ER dept, eventually quiting the part time thing. I also could not get use to on call, (never worked on call) so to get a phone call late in the evening because someone didn't know how to change out the batteries in their pump got to me. I did see where there are a lot of independent infusion facilities in the lower 48, so working in a hospital is not always the option.

Not every nurse I employ is able to initiate a peripheral, as a majority of the patients have central lines as they are on therapies with a duration of greater than 2 weeks or five IV start days.

Hi! I became interested in infusion nursing after working home health infusions. I did a lot of iv ig infusions in people's homes where I was the only IV resource. That made me work hard at increasing my skill level. I never was that great at IVs until I had the time to really focus on it.!