DIALYSIS! I am new in the field and feeling very discouraged

[GeauxNursing]

My habit is: turn off the blood pump, clamp the 2 big lines on the patient end as I'm about to connect the patient, then immediately clamp the saline line. Clamp, clamp, clamp. Detach the lines from each other, and hook up the patient.

[GeauxNursing]

In that case, you are not doing assessments, you are doing data collection. You shouldnt have to asses heart or lungs. The rn does that. You are just checking temp, edema, asking for shortness of breath, documenting heart rate, and presence of thrill and bruit. The machine will tell you the start time, you can go back and look that up later. I honestly start the tx, write down weight, start time, starting bp, temp and then move on to the next patient. Do your machines not automatically carry over the blood pressure lines to the computer? That saves time, too. On ours, once the bp takes, it generates a whole line of bp, art and ven pressures, tmp, uf removed. Then you can go back to it later and type a note. If youre in the middle of something else. .