flyingchange

Food for thought, but if your desired program is for an NP qualified for all-ages, you may not have enough pediatric experience to get in (assuming you work adult med/surg). When I was interested in applying, they were turning away experienced adult emergency nurses who didn't have enough pediatrics. At any rate, you can never have too much experience before applying. Spend another year in a specialty related to the program, it will only benefit you! Good luck.

Hi Crisbiss, I haven't been back on this forum for a while, but I decided on MPH because I really like how diverse everyone's background is. We have lots of physicians, allied health, epidemiologists, environmental health, nutritionists, etc etc in the program. It is really nice to get out of the nursing "echo chamber". I've also been able to contribute a nursing perspective to non-nursing issues. In my program, you can select one of 5 majors. Mine is in health policy & management. My thought process is that there aren't enough health professionals involved in policy-making, so I should do that :) So far it's an excellent program and I'm enjoying my time in it.

I would just like to add that AHS is not the only game in town! I work for a major university, get way better benefits, and an excellent schedule with summer holidays and a week at Christmas. What's more is that I am not one of 60+ nurses doing my same job. Nurses are a respected special snowflake on our team of MDs and Pharma reps. We recently tried to hire 2 nurses (RN or LPN) and got only a few licensed applicants, and a whole lot of unqualified foreign MDs. We can't attract staff because no one thinks to look on websites other than AHS.

I'm starting in Fall 2014 at University of Alberta. Is there anyone else out there, Canadian or otherwise?

Saw this going around FB and it's quite clever! [video=youtube_share;DxoAbK5Pc6w]

I had a homecare infusion client whose RN wife wanted to give his infusions via butterfly as she was not comfortable with IV catheters. His infusions only lasted for 15-30 minutes. All the research I turned up indicate that butterfly infusions are safe for up to 2 hours - although you'd have to monitor it like a hawk and the pt would have to stay basically motionless.

In my ED, there are a few NPs, but their role is to manage chronic disease patients. So there is one who sets up follow-up care for heart disease patients, and another who prescribes IV antibiotics for the IV clinic and decides when they are safe to switch to oral abx. This should not be taken as a slight against NPs, because I think they are important and necessary, but managing acute trauma is not really within their scope (except maybe helping to order stuff). IIRC, NP scopes-of-practice cover routine presentations and uncomplicated patients. Unless of course you work in Nunavut, then you are "it" until the MD can consult. That's not to say you can't be heavily involved in trauma as a nurse. Flight nurses get HUGE training and are incredibly skilled. I knew a CNE who was a flight nurse, she had tips and tricks for everything.

According to Lexicomp, these are compatible, and there are no warnings against infusing concomitantly - is there any reason you couldn't run them together?

Already have my grad school application in for 2014, and it's not in nursing..

I would recommend that you work in the specialty where you eventually want to work in research. I'm an emergency RN and I have been working in Emergency Medicine research since January; my experience on the floor has been invaluable. In addition, you should clarify whether you want to be a researcher or a research nurse. The two are very different - do you want to conduct your own studies (for which you'd require your MSN or PhD) or do you want to be a clinical research coordinator (for which you probably need your BSN and anything more would be overqualified). I'm a research coordinator so I could tell you about that if you have any further questions. I work almost exclusively with physicians. I do not work with nursing researchers except for one co-investigator on a study that is done by another group, so I'm not sure about the differences from physician investigators.

I work for a university and a private homecare company. I don't regret leaving AHS for a second. The benefits are way better outside of the union negs, too. I kept my casual position to maintain my seniority, but it's really nice not feeling too worried about all the political BS flying around.

I heard the radio ad. They are very disparaging... the whole campaign is baffling! Unless it's to try and justify bringing on more NAs and HCAs in lieu of nurses...?

Well said Jan!

Research nurses need to be highly organized and very detail oriented (ask me how I know). In life I am a very Type B, but at work I know the status of all my studies, my research patients, and all of their extensive paperwork. Typical ICU nursing experience would play well into this role, I believe. Everyone at my office, except the PIs, are under 35. That wasn't always the case, though. The 2 previous team leads were well seasoned nurses and when they retired, we had a big change of staff. Good luck!

Depends what area you work in. I'm in Emergency Medicine. Several of our studies get me in the heart of the action without TOO much responsibility. I also find working to tight timelines to be very fast-paced. Different strokes!

Yes, these are called Case Report Forms, and they are for officially documenting the data to be tracked at each visit: bloodwork, vitals, that kind of thing. We consider CRFs the actual study documentation (what actually gets put into the database for analyzing results) and we consider your medical record info (x-rays, CT, etc) to be supporting documentation. Yes you should have SOPs in place at the very outset of a study. We have one set of SOPs for our group, not for each study. Off the top of my head, the most critical are informed consent and protecting patient information.

I had 6 months of ED RN experience before I was hired as research coordinator in emergency medicine research. It was all about what I brought to the table from my previous experience. I think you'd be a solid candidate.

Amazing! Thanks for your help!

Hi everyone, I'm currently in the beginning stages of coordinating a new study. I'm pretty new to this role (just hit 6 months). It's a brand new study (the PI basically just handed me the grant proposal and said here you go, let's get started) Now that I've hammered down exactly what data points they want to capture and on what days, I need to develop the CRFs. We have lots of CRFs from other studies that I could poach from but I find they are needlessly bloated and I would like to start from scratch. Can you provide any pointers about creating CRFs and what you do and don't like about the ones you currently use? This study is observational and will require daily visits to admitted inpatients. I also need an enrollment/baseline package, a discharge package, and a 14-day post-discharge package. I think I will do separate packages for each, and a generic "daily visit" sheet for the other days. Thanks for your help, Klone (since it feels like it's just the two of us in here sometimes! ) ETA: Is MS Word the best Office software for creating paper forms? I'm decently proficient but I'm new to making forms that I will use for hard-copies.

Me too

I'm curious about how "at-risk" the bonuses really are. I mean, AHS fell short by basically every metric they measured. OCP all the time, no decrease in LOS for subacute, deep cuts to disabled care. Not sure how they justified to themselves that they earned their "at-risk" pay. Thanking Jeebus every day that I'm no longer relying on AHS to pay my bills...

So happy my primary employer isn't AHS anymore. Although it's not so great working for a university right now either.

They aren't - we call RAAPID 24/7

They find beds and consults for patients who need to be moved from one place to another. All requests for beds and consults must go through RAAPID. The nurse on the phone ultimately decides what happens with the patient, and some nurses get pretty uppity about that. They have argued with the unit clerks about what the MD's plan is (many times). They have demanded to know all kinds of irrelevant information like whether the pt came in by EMS or what their discharge plans are, even though they are an unstable NSTEMI. I get the point for RAAPID but nearly every charge nurse and unit clerk on my unit has been verbally abused by them before. As they say, **** flows downhill, so one wonders what their supervisors are telling them. Not sure what it would be like to work there. I've worked in call centers before and "never again" not even as a nurse.

Not sure what it's like to work for them, but I definitely know what it's like to call them... dare I say RAAPID is the bane of our existence in Emerg? It all depends on the individual nurse you speak to.