preceptorship in pacu

[cjdmomma]

I am a nursing student in her final semester. At my school, we are allowed to make suggestions as to where we would like to go. I came up with a few options that I thought would be interesting. I was placed in the PACU. I am super excited, because the area is so new to me.

All that being said, I need some help. As part of my clinically required paperwork, I need to come up with some objectives. These are tasks I would like to accomplish before the end of my rotation...and yes, it is part of my grade.

What I would like help with is this: Obviously I am not asking for you to do my homework and none of you know what I areas I need to work on, but I need some good ideas for objectives. If I was precepting on a med surg unit I would pick as something like, "complete 5 successful IV starts under the supervision of my precepting RN."

What are some skills that are specific to the unit, that a new nurse should want to practice?

Thanks in advance,

Emily

[cjdmomma]

Not sure if this is relevant, but I will be at a smaller-mid sized level IV trauma center.

[emain86]

PACU is all about monitoring patient's for change and life-threatening things.

Managing pain and getting them safely to their next level of care; wether that is home, a med surge floor, or an ICU. So base your goals off of that. Here are a few of my bullets that I thought could be good goals. 75% of the time you'll be bored and pushing drugs, but you have to be spot on when your patient stops breathing or you wonder why they're still tachy with a ETCO2 of 70 and septic.

•Provide acute care for adult post-operative patients recovering from anesthesia, encompassing ambulatory surgical procedures, invasive and extensive surgeries, and trauma

•Identify and manage life-threatening post operative anesthetic complications

•Implementing plan of care to facilitate transfer to surgical floors

•Managed post-surgical pain while monitoring patients for critical changes in vital signs

•Assessing and monitoring patients from the operating room, facilitating emersion from anesthesia

•Assisting with extubation of ventilated patients

•Ventilator management

•EKG monitoring, maintenance of arterial lines, determining patient's stability to return to surgical unit

•Exceptional capacity to multitask: manage numerous, often competing priorities with ease

[cjdmomma]

Thank you emain86. I appreciate the help, you have given me some great ideas.