Keeping up nursing skills

[Jmira.BSN.RN]

Hello fellow psych nurses,

Although I do care for many MI patients with chronic health problems, it is not the meat and potatoes of my job. This is my first job as an RN and without any real medical experience other than clinicals and working as a nursing assistant, I find myself reading through textbooks from time to time to keep non-psych nursing fresh in my brain.

What tools/resources do you guys utilize to keep up the bedside knowledge/skills? Any particular reading materials, classes, or certs that you feel are beneficial? (Aside from BLS/ACLS/NIHSS)

Thanks guys! Hope we all made it through the recent full moons just fine

[PG2018]

Is there something you're especially concerned about being able to do, i.e. some psychomotor skill, that you couldn't reference if need be? If so, continually train on that. If not, then I submit that a theoretical knowledge is sufficient. Books, Google, apps, other nurses, etc. are always available for idea queries.

You know, one of the unique things about EMS is that they generally have "refresh" themselves every couple of years. I've been an EMT-basic, and an EMT-paramedic. It's a royal pain for the working EMS practitioner, but it's really not a bad thing in general because there are countless EMTs who have never spent one day doing anything EMT-related post-course completion.

Actually, most of the "skills" that nurses seem afraid to lose on here when these types of discussions pop up are "skills" that I hope to never do again, lol. I have no desire to put a tube in someone's urethra or pour liquid goo into a tube to someone's belly. Skills are not hard to come by.

[Whispera, MSN, RN]

Back in the day....I was hired as float nurse in a major hospital. Having just come out of nursing school, I was concerned about my skills, since no one gets enough experience in nursing school to be all she/he wants to be. The manager who hired me told me that what she needed was someone who could think and learn. She said a monkey can learn the skills, but not everyone can think. Someone who can think and is willing and motivated to learn, can learn skills or re-learn t hem when they're needed.

[jemz21]

I have always been worried about losing my "skills" since I decided to go into Psych Nursing. However, I always believed that if you really want to learn, re-learn your skills, you can.

[Umberlee]

I'll admit I was kind of appalled when I started working the floor at my psych hospital and saw the lack of comfort that long-term psych nurses had developed regarding routine medical procedures. I've even worked with a few psych nurses who stated they had gone into psych because they didn't want to deal with the "gross stuff." The direct-line staff are usually the mental health workers and they have such minimal training when it comes to personal care that I think it's really unfair when a nurse expects a MHW (who is busy juggling a lot of diverse duties at any given moment anyway) to be the one to do a much-needed shower on an extremely obese person with candiasis in every skin fold, or to be responsible for catheter care and ensuring that a leg bag is aseptically switched to a downdrain bag, or those types of things. I see a lot of "passing the buck" in our hospital and it's really unfair to the patients. That isn't really along the lines of nursing skills per se, but a more basic problem in the culture at the facility where I work. We don't even have catheters or insertion kits here and not long ago we had a gentleman actually have to go to the ER just for a poorly-draining catheter...could have totally been managed with a flush if we were set up at all to deal with really basic medical issues.