Handling Emergencies Outside the Unit

[sergel02]

Hi all. I have a question I was curious about after a lecture today on neonatal emergencies. I know NICU nurses can handle the emergencies in the NICU and babies don't leave until they're better generally.

What I wonder is how you handle emergencies in the community, like with adults and kids, given your experience of working mainly with neonates? Like people say that if a someone passes out at a store or there is a car crash on the road, and you're the only medically trained professional around, you should be able to do something (CPR, assessing airway, organizing bystanders). Would you feel like you could, or have you done something like that before, even though these are adults or kids and not babies?

[sergel02, BSN]

It'd be with a gigantic needle though. That's what I always have to remind myself when I get cocky about the idea of adult IVs

lol must count for something though. Seems like the basics of critical care are the same everywhere. Though in NICU that seems to be where the similarities stop.

I am curious though, where do you decide to insert your IVs?

[BittyBabyGrower, MSN, RN]

We keep an adult ambu and masks in our respiratory room.

Before we had rapid response in house we called a code blue and no one was showing up (insert a lot of swear words), we recalled it and when they showed up they thought the operator meant MICU since we only have babies ugh!!! Now if we call our postpartum friends come with their crash box to rescue us lol

[sergel02, BSN]

Having finished up my rotation of one day In The nicu and working with adults again for now, I think I realized a few things. NICU nurses have that critical care expertise so they can be calm when things go bad...well sometimes. There was a mother getting a little dizzy when I was in the nicu and that's the only time they looked panicked, but anything else going on they were calm.

In the community setting most people won't have a crash cart with them anyway, so I dunno if Adult icu or picu nurses could do anymore than a nicu one, other than being More comfortable with bigger humans. Though I did hear of some nurses healing out during disasters in my area, but there was a variety of nurses there from ob to public health to ER.