Patient Population?

lasair · Aug 13, 2015

the youngest Patient I've worked with, in Psych, was 3

Do tell!!

lasair · Aug 13, 2015

I mostly work with adult individuals who have Huntington's Disease. The disease can cause behavioural, emotional and mental health symptoms due to brain changes.

Itshamrtym · Aug 13, 2015

Thank you!

ChildPsychRN · Aug 16, 2015

I currently work on a pediatric unit that houses children from age 2 to 12. The youngest on the unit at this time is 4. The youngest I have cared for is 3. I also pick up a lot of overtime on other shifts, so I see adolescents and adults. Our hospital divides the patients into strictly detox, dual diagnosis, acute psychosis, etc. It's definitely interesting to float to those places. We also have two units for developmentally challenged children and those with Autism. I don't usually work those units because I have difficulty with the amount of chaos and number of non-verbal children.

vintagemother, BSN, CNA, LVN, RN · Aug 20, 2015

Just curious what patient population everyone works with, or would like to work with.

I worked in a facility with 2 units. 1 was an acute care unit. These were people who were DTS/DTO and placed on involuntary holds at our place after police or an emergency room were utilized. We simply stabilized and sent them back to the community...to them return in a few weeks/months.

The other unit was LTC. The clients were so disabled by mental illness that the judge ordered that they could not care for themselves. These people were mostly stable, because they had been pts for a long while, years, usually. Many of these pts had been involved in horrific crimes in the long past, but rather than be sent to prison, were sent to a LTC psych.

I loved working in the LTC unit.

Age groups: officially 18-pre-Geri. But. Many in their 20s. Many in 40-60's!

hiphopRN · Aug 26, 2015

I work with adults (18+) of all diagnoses. However, our unit ends up getting a much higher percentage of psychotic and trauma patients than other diagnoses. When I first went into psych I wanted to be far away from psychotic disorders, now I can't get enough! I love all my patients, but like someone else said the axis II patients are definitely a challenge.

Stephalump · Sep 6, 2015

Adults who have been deemed incompetent to stand trial...so inmates. Mostly male. I honestly love the population. My goal is to get into detox/addictions.

SwampCat, BSN · Sep 8, 2015

I'm starting orientation on Monday for the under 14 crowd. I rotated through this floor during my clinicals and I'm not really all that excited. I originally wanted to get into adolescents (I did my capstone on adolescent unit) but now that I have a teen with BPD in my own house I'm singing a different tune. School health and women's health are my main interests. I would love to work acute detox. I often had to 1:1 for patients like these at my PCT job and I found them so interesting. It blew my mind to see them go from coherent to DTs and then start to come out again throughout their stay in the CCU. I can't deny that I also found their hallucinations somewhat entertaining, especially when this one older gentleman thought I was a prostitute and he was trying to get me to climb into the bed of his truck (the hospital bed).