Question from future nurse

[Suebelle]

I am a high school senior and I plan on becoming a nurse. I am currently doing a writing project for school based on my career path of becoming a Labor and Delivery Nurse. Unfortunately this is not something you can demonstrate in school so I chose to do my topic on Ultrasounds.

My questions is - what portion of your training is spent on learning Ultrasounds? If there is any other information you can provide, it would be greatly appreciated :)

Thank you ~ Cassie

[bagladyrn, RN]

Ultrasound is not something that all L&D nurses do. There are specialized courses in "Limited Ultrasound for Nurses". One of the issues for nurses doing ultrasound is legal liability if something is missed by the nurse doing the ultrasound, even if the nurse was only looking for the position of the baby with the ultrasound.

There are a lot of other areas of labor and delivery nursing you could cover in class - stages of labor, fetal development, labor options (lamaze, epidurals, bradley, c/section, water birth,etc.)

Good luck with your project!

[canoehead, BSN, RN]

At my hospital we do NO ultrasounds, the docs come in to do them, but an RN from England says it is common practice over there to do it to RO previa or malposition.

[SmilingBluEyes]

nurses do not do U/S where i work. and i am not interested in it. I leave it up to the U/S techs and doctors, where that responsibility belongs. If you are interested in U/S you need to take courses in that area........if you want to be an OB nurse, don't plan to spend a lot of time learning U/S.....you have enough to do w/o doing that too.