Med Surge and Telemetry

[mollyz]

Hi .

I am was wondering if some one could explain the duties of these two types of nursing. Thanks!

[littleroxy79]

i work on a telemetry floor. with our telemetry, we monitor all the "heart" patients, chest pain, arrhythmias, syncope, etc. any kind of cardiac history. basically the assessments are the same, but you have to monitor bps, weights, output/intake. i hope that helps. med surg i couldn't tell you about.

[JenNJFLCA]

On my tele floor we get open heart patients, plus a wide variety of ER/transplant/ortho pts if they need a tele bed. My floor is supposed to be mostly open heart/vascular post-surgical pts, but when you need a bed, you need a bed and we get everyone.

[littleroxy79]

that's how it is on our floor sometimes. but we have to be mostly selective because our unit is a swing unit for telemetry and intermediate care. in our intermediate care we get all of the critical drips, transplants, heart devices. but when the census is low, we take overflow telemetry and some of those turn out to be medsurg, but not so much. on the other floors it's the same as what you are talking about.

[BGgirl]

The floor I work on is a med-surg/cardiac step-down unit and everyone is monitored on telemetry. A lot of our patients are cardiac patients in with chest pain, ACS, arrhythmias etc. We take drips on our floors like dopamine, cardizem, natrecor, heparin, labetalol just to name a few.

Aside from our cardiac patients we take post-op patients, people with chest tubes, trauma patients this list could go on and on. Working on a med-surg floor you get a huge variety of many different kinds of patients..

Being on telemetry just means we monitor their heart rhythm, pulse ox, bp etc. We have monitors at the nurses station where we can see everyone's cardiac rhythm.

[AfloydRN, BSN, RN]

Your med surg is the catch all floor. If they are not surgical, neuro, ortho, tele, icu, icc, they go there. No tele.