smurfynurse

I work on a unit like that. Personally, I enjoy kids but I don't feel comfortable taking care of them in the hospital. I'm a recent new grad and although I've had the Peds nursing class in school, I just don't feel quite skilled enough yet to be mixing adult nursing care in with peds nursing care. I mean, there are so many differences between the two types of nursing care. Kids are not just miniature adults and for the sake of the kids I think they are too precious to get less than the most knowledgeable PEDS nurse taking care of them. But then that's just my opinion. Also, on the unit where I work we also have patients on telemetry, post surgical, isolation, etc, etc. There is no rhyme or reason to how the rooms are assigned to patients (except for private and semi-private rooms) and there is no rhyme or reason as to pt assignments. We just get a set of room numbers next to one another. We might have a person with chest pain r/o MI, along with a baby w/ RSV, a post abdominal surgery, and a couple more pts in addition to all of that. Don't ask how it makes, I'm still trying to figure that one out myself. But what can I say, it's a relatively small rural hospital.

I work on a 32 bed med/surg floor that also accepts telemetry patients, however we do not read the strips ourselves. The telemetry is monitored by our ICU and during each shift the secretary goes up to the ICU and writes down the readings for us on a clipboard. Most of our nurses on the med/surg floor are not ACLS and generally have an Associate's degree. I find a lot of times in report the nurses will tell what the patient's telemetry has been reading, but don't actually know what it means unless it's something normal.