BlueEyedGuy

I moved out-of-state for the past 10 months to get a new grad job on a Telemetry unit(we're also the step-down unit) at a regional level 2 trauma center in the northern midwest. I'm looking to find a hospital that hires into their ICU(s) with my one year-ish experience (it'll be a year by the time I get hired somewhere, I imagine). And I'd prefer within commute distance from either SF or Sacramento. I have experience with some drips, but not really vents, swans or art lines. Any suggestion on hospitals? Do I need more experience? Should I expect to take a step-down/tele job in CA and transfer to ICU when allowed?

I work at a mid-sized hospital on a 32-bed 'Telemetry' unit, but we are THE step-down unit. We titrate NTG, dopamine, dobutamine, diltiazem, and a few other drips (not levo or epi). We have monitors at bedside that we can wirelessly sync to the Tele box at our own discretion. While sync'd we can import vitals from the monitor to the chart also.The only time I've seen a-lines is when the cardiologist leave the stent in from a Cath and we can hook up a transducer to that, but that's usually only for a few hours until we pull the stent. The only thing we don't really see much is trauma, they're either in the ICU or end up on surgical(ortho or neuro).

We had the Effient reps in last week, and I have the literature in front of me, because I was curious about this too. Effient reaches the therapeutic level of about 75% platelet inhibition in about 2 hours with a loading dose. And since it's an irreversible agent, binding to the platelet for the life of the platelets (around 7 days), it doesn't matter that the half life of the drug is 7 hours, because the effect won't wear off completely for about 5-9 days while inhibited platelets die off. Actually in the first 24 hours, inhibition only drops a few percentage points, which is really good for a once a day drug. I worried if these guy bleed though, all you can do in stop the drug and dump more platelets in them, right? edit: added a little more.

You can fight if off locally, the counties have to allow it individually.

It has been a week since anyone's posted about getting an interview. Anyone getting calls? What unit(s)?

I was wondering if people have gotten calls from other units. We've only heard from Reebles on here so far. I'm really interested in critical care units and emergency.

I read a post of someone who did this, and I was wondering how it worked. Do they orient you like a full time employee and then you just get called off a lot, and obviously no benefits. Is it a good idea? Is it easier to get hired this way? Did you get hired full time by the employer eventually? I'm in a tough job market, and it would be hard for me to move. So, I'm looking at some unconventional ways of getting my career going. If anyone else has some tips on unconventional first jobs, I'd love to hear that also.

Okay, so I found a new grad posting (rare), and the want ACLS (which I have), but also: Basic Cardiac Monitoring Certification and Telemetry Certificate required. Are those easily obtained? How do I do it? Are there online ones? Do I need these if I have ACLS? Are they just trying to hire their monitor techs that went to nursing school?

No one said this yet on here, I think. I talked to someone from nurse recruiting on Tuesday and they said they are hiring 40 new grads, "the most we've ever taken." So, all other things being equal 40/500 x100% = 8% chance of getting a job if you got your application in.

Same here. My school didn't do senior preceptorships, that's why I want a solid nurse residency so badly. I hope that doesn't hurt my chances. I'm also a UC alumnus, I wonder if that helps at all. I didn't see any unit preference form in the application. I thought they were going to include that.

I've read accounts of people getting into training programs with companies out of school, and some companies have hints about these programs on their websites, but no real information It this a state practice act thing? I called one clinic (a Fresenius) and they said they cannot hire New Grads due to a CMS regulation requiring 1 year of experience. It also seems that some companies may get around these requirements by having you work as a "Tech" the first year. Is that how it works? Once again, I'm in California if that helps. I know some people will say going into a specialty like this right off is a bad idea, but it's a tough job market and I want to cast a wide net as I've apply from everything from ER(my passion) to SICU, corrections, mental health, public health, and more.

Stanford is desirable experience for new nurses to get on their resume, but from what I hear they are not the best employer in the area(as far as benefits, salary, etc). It costs tens of thousands of dollars to train new nurses, and these nurses tend to move on after a year or two. So travel nurses will keep their costs down.

That's not how tax brackets work. You don't even hit the 35% bracket if you're making under 90k. Or are you just estimating and adding in state income tax as well?

Everyone feels like they failed, because the nature of the test is to find the limit of how hard the level of questions you can take. If you get a few questions correct in the beginning in a row, then you could get every other question wrong and still pass (as in alternating right/wrong/right). I walked out of the test feeling like I got beat up and possibly failed @75, but I passed on Tuesday; license posted on the state board the next day! Do the peasronvue trick and find out.

Look, your scores are good. You've been out of school for three months. Why wait any longer? Some studies show waiting longer just decreases you chances of passing. I'm the taking it next week and your scores are higher than mine so far.

I thought the rule of thumb on Kaplan Trainers was >60% = good to go, and >65% is excellent.

ATI has this function, you just have to click the bubbles to the left of each answer. 77% of the Ati Comphrensive practice tests is pretty good. I got a 73% on the A one, and a 76% on the B one, and my predictor score was: Adjusted Individual Total Score: 84.7% Predicted Probability of Passing NCLEX-RN® on the First Attempt: 99% Percentile Rank - National: 98 The practice tests do seem to correlate with the predictor (my teacher used the practice tests as like mid-terms for our capstone class), and I think most people in my class actually did better on the predictor. I think you probably have a predicted probability of passing NCLEX in the mid-90's percentage-wise. That's just a guess though. For the actual predictor a 69.3% correlates with a 90% of passing nclex, and a 77% would be a 98% chance. Here's part of the predictor scale: " Adjusted Individual Score Predicted Probability of Passing NCLEX® 80.7% - 100.0% 99% 80.0% 98% 79.3% 98% 78.7% 98% 78.0% 98% 77.3% 97% 76.7% 97% 76.0% 97% 75.3% 96% 74.7% 96% 74.0% 95% 73.3% 95% 72.7% 94% 72.0% 94% 71.3% 93% 70.7% 92% 70.0% 91% 69.3% 90% 68.7% 89% 68.0% 88% 67.3% 87% 66.7% 86% 66.0% 84% 65.3% 82% 64.7% 81% 64.0% 79% 63.3% 77% 62.7% 75% 62.0% 73% 61.3% 70% ..."

Not that this means anything, but I was drinking with some alumni of my program the other night, and she was saying Kaplan is bulls***. Awesome chick btw, she made charge nurse 9 months into practice on an ICU-step down unit. She said Hurst is awesome, they keep it simple, and say things in a way that you'll remember it.

Here's my plan: 1.) Hurst Review for content. The cool thing about hurst is that it's a targeted review, their philosophy is NCLEX 80% med-surg content, so they focus on that core content. Hurst isn't REALLY a book though, it's a review course. If you take it in person you get their book, and if you take it online you get the book as .PDFs to download and print out. 2.) Lippincott's Q&A Review for NCLEX by Diane Billings-- After Hurst I'm going to focus on doing question. I'm planning on 240 questions a day. 2 hours of questions, 2 hours reviewing what I got wrong, do that morning and afternoon. 3.) Then I have access to ATI questions, so I might do some of those. 4.) Maybe NCLEX 3500. 5.) Hurst all the way through again at some point. I have the yellow Saunders book too. I'll probably use that as a reference for looking up stuff I missed. If you need test-taking strategies, than grab the Kaplan book or take their class. We had ATI through school, and I think they did a good job of forcing me to learn prioritization, so I think I'll skip the strategies and go for content and questions. Also, if you get the Kaplan class people say their questions are good/slash hard and really prepare you for NCLEX.

It's funny how fast these threads deteriorate into, "Please PM/email me at ____." I wonder it there are Pearson agents on here trying to get people to talk about specific test questions to bust them. Sorry to thread jack, but i just wanted to point out a trend that I noticed. Please continue.

I had a simple brown clip board with a cardboard folder clipped to it. A lot of my classmates got a cool clipboard from Walmart that was plastic (easy clean), you could fit paper inside the body, and it had a calculator on top. All I brought to clinical was a drug book first semester (CI didn't want us using phones). After, than I just used the Micromedex app on my phone. Does she have a list of cardiac meds you need to have? Otherwise just pick a prototype drug the most popular one from each class of drug (digoxin, ACE, ARB, Beta blocker, each class of diuretics, Statins, CCBs --there's a bunch of different kinds though norvasc, Procardia,verapamil, and Cardizem would be a good start--, Amiodarone for sure, Adenosine, atropine, find out if you need to know pressors (dopamine, epi, norepi, vaso), dobutamine, etc. Then just make spend time on excel making it pretty, and put references on the bottom professors love references.

Yes, all those success series books are pretty good (the questions and rationale aren't always the best). I had the pharm one, and the med-surg one (for med surg and every class, I also used Lippincott's NCLEX Q&A, best question book IMO). Some people swear by those Review and Rationales books by Mary Ann Hogan. I never got them, because I didn't like the formatting. Also, if your school uses ATI, I don't really see the need if you have the ATI books/outlines. Also for PHARM, we had online modules "Pharmacology Made Easy" or something through ATI, which were really annoying, but they had extensive quizzes at the end that were pretty good. Also if you guys use the Pharm textbook by Lehne, the evolve website had awesome outlines, they called them key points, but they had everything I needed on it to ace the class; I printed them all double sided and made a binder. I'd highlight those (more than once, adding little mnemonics that I made up), and annotate (I also printed the powerpoints and took notes on those). I wish other books had a resource like that, I would have liked nursing school a lot more.

I love these stories! Our know-it-all, 'I know everything about OB, la-la-la, I am awesome' student reportedly passed our scrubbed into a c-section. All of our OB clinical instructors currently work on that unit too. I'm sure they all had a good laugh about that one.

It really depends on your local job market. Apply for the BSN (flexibility), and if get a job out of school, then drop it or go part-time on the BSN; or drop it an find a more convenient online BSN if you still want to finish it.

Personally, I got as many of the books as I could used for cheap (ask the class ahead of you), AND got most of the pageburst books. They are like half the cost of the new version of the paper book. Pageburst is AWESOME. It probably saved me dozens of hours of flipping to the index of the book and back. Searchable books rule. You can even search all you books at once from the home page. Pro-tip: Make sure the search for synonyms separately ie. coumadin and warfarin. I found pageburst was great for quick reference, but the paper book was still needed, because if I'm going to read a whole chapter, I can't stare at a computer screen for 3-4 hours without serious eye fatigue.