Rabid Badger

Not according to the Faculty of Nursing official grading scale

B+

Yes you need to be an RN for the ICU. Ive only seen LPNs in one ICU here and they worked well under scope and not as bedside nurses.

Ah ok.

Are you in Canada?

We are opening a huge new oncology centre with a year (I think, as it is under construction currently) at the Foothills Medical Centre. Keep your eyes peeled for positions there and specifically at Tom Baker Centre (the current oncology centre).

I did this exact move almost 6 years ago and was successful. I did not give notice in Winnipeg until I had landed something here. However I was successful for two reasons, there was a new hospital opening up at the time and I am specialized in critical care with experience. You didn't say if you have experience and in what area. Can you elaborate? It is much harder to find employment with AHS right now as an external applicant. My suggestion is to apply for the jobs posted online that you are qualified for and don't be picky about the FTE. Most people get in casual to start lately.

I've never heard of high dose insulin therapy for beta blockers. Its usually treated with glucagon and supportive therapy. High dose insulin therapy is usually reserved and well documented for calcium channel blocker overdose.

Sorry, but I think hourly rounding should be mandatory. I work on an extremely busy ward and I round every hour. It doesn't mean I have to do anything to check to make sure my patients are still breathing. Many a time the only way we have caught a patient from coding, in severe pain, IV's going interstitial, a confused patient climbing out of bed was by rounding. I can't imagine not seeing a patient for 3 hours and then finding they have been dead on the floor for the last two. At minimum, you should be thinking about your licence.

The one thing that I don't get from your posts are any personal responsibility. Somehow it's all the school's fault, its a conspiracy theory, they're out to get you. Occam's razor would suggest that there is a reason why they have put you on probation and learning contracts. The Dean doesn't get involved for fun. I have seen many a student nurse failed in their last term or in practicum, often because they were clearly lacking, but for some reason were passed through earlier clinicals. Better to fail them in school than to put them out on the wards and kill a patient. The fact that you do not offer up any semblance of responsiblity suggests to me that there might be some truth to the allegations.

I enjoy working codes, but dammit, why do they always happen at shift change?

Well this is unfortunate. Actually everything you listed for what you learned in ICU we do on my Medical ward! Except we don't do CRRT, but we recover HD. What else I do: Manage codes, on a virtually daily basis. Run 4+ IV continuous infusions on a single patient. Have a patient code, work on them for 2 hours, send them up to ICU only to discover your second (of 6) turns up a pressure of 70/30, spend the next 7 hours bolusing, giving 11ty billion cc's of albumin to, vitaling q5mins, hoping you don't lose a second in 1 shift. Manage central lines on all 6 of your patients. NGs/trachs/ostomies/chest tubes/vac drsgs/tpn/etc etc. Give every imaginable blood product. Airborne isolation. Assist in an on-ward endoscope QID drsg changes on a coccyx wound the size of a dinner plate, wherein intestine and spine are exposed. What to do when your patient collapses and bleeds out 3 litres in 2 minutes. What to do when your doc doesn't want to take the above bleed seriously. What to do when your patient goes into flash pulmonary edema. What to do when your patient starts hitting your staff and threatening your life. Take in 2 unstable admissions in at the same time while you are transfusing another and doing above mentioned drsg changes and trach mgmt on your others. Learn how to not kill yourself after the first 3 months. Manage non-intubated ICU patients where there is no bed for them in ICU. Recieve transfers from ICU, have your patient code 20 minutes later, then ship them back upstairs. Thanks for stopping by! This is only the tip of the iceberg. I'm sorry your med/surg experience was a whole lot of CNA work. But that's certainly a far cry from what I do on a daily basis. Medicine on this ward is a constant case of :uhoh3:

This is untrue. Since no vaccine is 100% effective, there is about 10-30% of vaccinated individuals who did not seroconvert. This is why herd immunity is so important. When you do not vaccinate, you risk not only exposing yourself and your loved ones to the illness, all others who have not been vaccinated, PLUS those 10-30% of vaccinated individuals who did not seroconvert, who depend on the 80% herd immunity to protect them. In addition, you are also potentiall exposing individuals who are either too young, too old, or too immunocompromised to be able to receive the vaccine or to safely seroconvert. This is why there is a public outcry. You are not only risking those who have made informed consent to refuse the vaccine, but plenty of others who are unaware or unable to protect themselves. Herd immunity for a number of diseases which had been virtually eradicated due to vaccines are now sitting at 60%. This makes the population ripe for an outbreak, and there has been recent evidence to prove this given outbreaks of measles, whooping cough and assorted other goodies that have been unheard of for the last many many years. Just because it is a rare contagious disease does not mean it won't be tomorrow, especially with the especially tenuous herd immunity rates according to US and Canadian Vaccinating monitoring agencies.

"I was like . He's in here because he was bleeding you idiots" Best quote ever. I love it. This is exactly what I would say, since I am a very much a loud mouth assertive nurse. If you were my student I would LMAO then give you a big shiny gold star. Excellent work.

Thanks for proving my points so eloquently throughout this thread! Simply genius!