Displaced

Do ask questions! Frequently!

We have had a couple, with serious injuries, in the last couple weeks.

Wikipedia has some nice basic information. Scroll down to the clinical lead groups section. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocardiogram You could also look in your hospital library for a book on it.

I love the look patients get when we tell them we have stopped testing for swine flu. I also love the doc offices who send them to us for swine flu testing after we have told them we no longer do it.

I have flown to many hospitals around my area that use medics for the RN role. I always saw them in the more rural areas, never in more populated places. Even in Aeromedical you have RN and Medic switch off who is primary on every other flight. I...

No. Nurses also follow protocols/rules/policies. You say tomato, I say tomato. Yes, nurses can address a wider spectrum of care, but in triage, deciding if the patient is going to die now, later or eventually due to anything but the chief complain...

Up until a couple days ago managers were asking who wanted to go home early, but now that we are very busy and we actually do want to go home, they have stopped asking.

Recently, I had to get a BP on a small kid because of an amphetamine ingestion. That was a pain in the ass. Most of the time we don't bother, unless requested by the doc.

I hate to say it, but you might be better off not saying anything at all, or just thanking the person after your question is answered. You could also just be clear with your preceptor from the beginning and tell them to expect a lot of questions, ev...

When I worked as a tech, I told new nurses to stop asking me if I had enough time to do something, and just tell me to do it. I am also the same person that would defend them from the ICU nurse attacks.... Nurse: Hey [my name], if you have a enough ...

When a patient is put in a room, a carbon copy of the triage note is placed in a rack and the actual chart is placed on a counter near the patient's room. Our rack is labeled with two big stickers that say, FIRST (on the right side) and LAST (on the...

Bombard the physicians. This is what they have trained and studied for. I would hate to have some one waiting in triage who goes into an arrhythmia because their ECG looked like sinus but actually showed Brugada. I know, very rare, and I HATE writ...

i guess it depends on where you go. our urgent care centers have the same protocols as our er.

Our triage area has 2 Nurses and 1 Tech. We have two methods depending on how many patients decide to walk in at the same time. The first and more relaxed method has the patient go to the registration area, give a little info, then into the triage ...

We recently coded a patient on the ground in our entrance. We transfer 10+ to the main hospital ER daily, it is only 5 min away. We have a public education campaign that both advertises the urgent care centers and mentions what should be seen there....

Jump in with both feet, ask to do anything and everything you can.

I want to start off by saying that you should feel a little uncomfortable about this since it is going to be something your ER has not tried yet. But, I believe based on what I have seen first hand from the paramedic curriculum, that any well educa...

Unless you want to thank the Charge RN also, don't bother, sending letters to everyone else you listed should work just fine. Thank you letters are awesome, it is a nice reminder as to why we do this job. Edit:Also, I love the non-latex balloons!

The place I use to work at had doors slam shut and the sound of footsteps when no one was around, but the freakiest of all was the sound of children laughing over the intercom system.

We usually have several nurses pregnant at the same time, I think some kind of pregnancy rotation has been set up. As other have said, most of them work till their due date if they are physically able to and are cleared by their doctor. But we also...

1. Pt. talking on the phone while I am trying to triage, assess, or discharge. I tell them they can either get off the phone or they can wait till I am done with the next patient or anything else that pops up. They put down the phone right away. 2. ...

Patient had a huge plastic bag that he liked to put his entire body into, attach it to a vacuum, lie on his bed face down and insert his manhood into a hole in the mattress. EMS called him in as a DOA.

"I have never had to unbuckle a fatality, but every wreck where the occupant was ejected was a fatality." Officer from the Major Accidents Unit

The best thing I have ever heard from one of our docs when ordering something out of protocol is, "Be prepared to explain why." She was helping one of the new nurses who had questions about what to order and why when she said this. Basically, what ...