Pediatric Nurse Qualifications

Pediatric Critical Care Columnist · Jan 26, 2009

If you're thinking about PICU, then your critical care course won't go to waste, exactly. There is a lot of overlap and many of the basics are the same. By that I mean that drawing an arterial gas is the same procedure no matter how big the patient is, hemodynamic monitoring is done exactly the same, pacemakers are used in a similar manner, many of the drugs are the same... but with a pediatric twist. Kids with certain heart defects will have arterial gases that would make the adult ICU call a code, but for them they're right where we want them. Your parameters on the monitor will be very different, HR higher, BP lower, RR higher and so on. Your pacemaker might be set to deliver a rate of 170 and that's fine. And the drugs are all calculated by weight, all of them. It wouldn't be a waste of time to take a critical care course, only remember that you'll have to learn a ton more in order to apply any of it when you make the jump to peds. If the hospital housing the PICU you're thinking about doesn't offer a pediatric critical care course, you'll be at an advantage over someone who has no background. A good PICU orientation will more than fill in the blanks for you. If you want to really stand out when you're making your move, take a Pediatric Advanced Life Support course (PALS), for which you'd already have a basis for understanding many of the concepts.

If you're thinking about general peds, a review of pediatric vital signs norms, growth and development and drug calculations would probably be enough.