Nsg in a Level 1 Trauma Center

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Hi all,

I'm a third-year BScN student and I've been interested in emergency nsg since I was very young and it's always stuck. Now that I have some experience in emerg, I'm wondering where I should do my consolidation next year.

The hospital that I'm used to working at is a smaller hospital. We don't use the Level definitions in Canada, but I think it would be between a Level 2 & 3. There are 3 resus/trauma beds and 8 acute beds with 1 resus bed in the acute care zone, but resp. therapists are only on-call over night. They will treat as much as possible, but pts still get airlifted if they are too complex (such as a brain anuerysm pt recently).

Anyway, I could do my consolidation at a bigger center (where our pts get airlifted to lol) I guess I'm just wondering where the best nursing experience comes from.

Do nurses do as much physical care in trauma situations at a level 1 center or do MDs or various other professionals do most of the care? At my hospital, the emerg nurses are working with 1 doc for the whole emergency (CDU, MTS, Trauma/Resus, Isol, ACZ, etc). So there are tons of standing orders and the nurses are able to do a lot w/o the doc.

I love getting down & dirty and I hate standing back or just being a go-for.

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