ICU Orientation

The AACN has a program online called Essentials of Critical Care Orientation. My hospital required (and paid for) the course during my orientation. It is time consuming to complete, but I felt it was worth it - it contains lots of great information. Go to the AACN website and I am sure you can find all the info you need about the program.

Same here. We are required to complete ECCO. The hospital pays for the program, we can do it from home, and we get paid a certain amount of hours for each module we complete.

In addition to the ECCO online course, we also have to attend several Critical Care Classes in house. These include: Basic EKGs, Hemodynamic Monitoring, Pacemakers, Critical Care Drugs, Harvey Team, and many more that I am too lazy to get my Internship book out and list. (smile)

In addition to that, we also have case study days for each system we are learning about...cardiac, pulmonary, renal, etc.

In addition to that (geez....I know) we also travel around to all the different areas of the hospital in 4 to 8 hour rotations....CV surgery (got to see a CABG), Cardiology, Cath Lab, Pharmacy, Blood Bank, Dialysis, etc. It gives you a closer look at what gets done where and how it effects your patient, and how the hospital works as a unit, etc. Some days are pretty boring while other rotations are really fun.

And of course, we spend lots of time on the floor with our preceptors doing hands on pt care. The entire program lasts six months and is very well organized. Each week, preceptee and preceptor have evaluations and competency checklists to complete.

we get 14 weeks...clinical and didactic in the picu. seems like a small amount when you realize how much there is to know...

we leave the new grad program as a level 2 picu nurses, meaning we can take care of vented patients alone, according to competencies.

it goes all the way up to level 5 and that takes years.

Just wondering about orientations to ICU. We orientate for 2 mths and that is working with our preceptor in the unit. I thought my orientation went very well. I feel like I don't know enough and some form of critical care course would help out alot. Just wondering what type of classroom/online education other ICU's required for new ICU nurses. I'm in the process of finding a book or online class that will help me out, so if anybody has any good recommendations I would appreciate it. Thanks!

So this isn't for new grads, but for nurses who are just new to the ICU that you are wondering about?

If so, then a critical care course, and 2 months seems adequate.

Critical Care courses ( plus CV-Critical Care if you're doing CVICU), EKG, Advanced EKG, 12-Lead EKG, and a final exam, 3 months with a preceptor.