Labs and vasopressors..new icu nurse needs advice

same here--never have seen it. It sounds strange. Assuming its an adult, does this patient have some weird anatomy that makes brachial A line impossible? Trauma?

I've had a few pedal A-lines. When you need a line, you need a line. We let our residents stick twice and then either an attending or one of the nurses with the A-Line cert do it.

We RARELY have RT do our gases. They do them a lot in ER and on the floors, but in our ICU- we do them. And if the pt is a hard venous stick- we do our AM labs (or any labs) arterial if we have to. We have a large population of control-freak Type-A nurses on the unit- so we do most stuff ourselves. I'm pretty sure we'd put in our own CVCs if we could!