New Trauma Nurse Help

[Mariah87]

Hi there, I am new to this website. I am a new ER nurse. I have completed my residency/orientation but I still do not feel comfortable in codes and trauma. I am worried about asking for more training at work. Does anyone know of any outside training/tutoring? I feel like it sounds ridiculous but it would just be amazing to sit down one on one with someone and go over everything that is done in codes and go over the algorithms etc.

Thank you.

[JordieRNCCRN]

I could not disagree more about "only doing blood transfusions, labs and charting the primary and secondary assessments". Your job is to do those things, but go behind the doctor, do your assessments, make sure you have all of the supplies you need, assist with procedures, ANTICIPATE injuries based on mechanism, alert your traumas appropriately, hemodynamic monitoring and advocate for your patients with rationale and critical thinking. You should definitely have TNCC, ATCN and work as scribe or secondary trauma nurse initially, as well as being closely supervised when working a trauma independently until you and your supervisors feel you are competent. The last thing you need is a trauma arrest or an airway emergency to come in and not know how to assess the patient appropriately and intervene. Never underestimate your responsibility. Trauma and charge nurse are the most liable positions in the ED.

[Rebelution]

TNCC will help a lot, also if you could sit in on an Advanced Trauma Life Support Class (ATLS), that will be helpful. Ask if you can keep your TNCC book and then self study it even after you've passed the course. It'll take time, you can't come in new and expect yourself to operate in the same capacity of someone with 15 years under them. Where I work, we do way more in trauma than charting and blood transfusions.

[ayysolapsu09]

A lot of good stuff here. A piece of advice that I have heard before is to be the "scribe" during a code. Everyone is supposed to shout their stuff out as things are being done (Epi at 0400, followed by flush, etc). If you are in charge of writing down what is happening, you can more quickly understand the flow of a code. Your ACLS will become more based in reality vs. theory if you have a few codes under your belt where you wrote stuff down. Another piece of advice is to do all parts of a code at least once. It is only scary if you've never done it before. You will probably mess something up at least once, and that's OK because your team will have your back if they're a good team. I don't sweat missing an IV because there are 3 others who are better at IVs than me (and I'm pretty good). It is a journey, and a scary one, but dive in head first and you'll be just fine.