pacuvanessa

You can tell by the amount of words per minute your pt speaks, how much pain medication will be required.

this has happened to you at least once a day : Your CRNA says "I gave him enough, he won't need anything for a while" and you've got the narcotics in your hand just waiting for your patient to get the oral airway out and start screaming in pain as the Fentanyl drains from his system,then you start pushing drugs as your patient goes on and on about what a high tolerance for pain he has...... CRNA returns and when he finds out how much you gave him, just keeps saying, I don't understand he was fine when I left him with an oral airway in.............. If it weren't for PACU nurses, the world would be in pain!!!

I know I'm not the only one out there reading these posts and getting so mad my head's spinning!!!:mad: Doesn't JCAHO or anyone like that read stuff like this and think about all this time we are LEAVING our patient's bedsides to go get doctors, get orders, fax orders, write orders, punch numbers in computers to get meds out, make phone calls to get meds that got lost or messed up, etc!!! Who's taking care of our patients??? This is not what I became a nurse for. I want to be a nurse, quality is very, very important to me, but these answers are hurting our patients. Do these agencies really think we are not going to do what is best for our patients???:confused:

Ours are Morphine 10mg IM (up to 1/3 may be given IV), then if not successful, may give dilaudid 0.5 mg IV every 10 minutes up to total 2mg Demerol 12.5 mg IV (for shivering ONLY!!!) and may repeat x 1 All these orders are stated to be for adults over the age of 12 and only if not allergic, also have orders for Zofran, Atropine, Narcan. Hope this helps!

I'm a seasoned PACU nurse with ICU experience and have seen nurses with and without ICU experience come and both caN do well, most depends on the person learning and the nurses doing the teaching. But, a lot depends on the PACU you are working in also and how much autonomy you have. If you have a lot of paramaters and are weaning and doing a lot of things under guidelines from anesthesia, those things are really hard to learn without ICU experience, only because in ICU you deal with the same things day in and day out, whereas in PACU, you may wean one day and then not get the chance to do it again for a week, so it makes it difficult to get really competent at it. You also really need a level of competence to begin with, to gain the anesthesiologist's confidence in the beginning. I wish you the best also, and I think PACU is one of the greatest places to work in the hospital!:redpinkhe

I work in a 17 bed PACU and we have OR hold patients frequently. We hold by our standards of PACU nurses not being able to take care of any more than 2 patients at a time and 1 ICU patient (unless really stable). If all our nurses have 2 patients, we simply make them hold in the OR. Usually the delay is caused because we are holding patients that are ready to go to the floor, ICU, CCU , or Outpatient Center and they don't have the space to take them. When management gets involved, usually space is made somewhere but we pretty much stick to our "guns" and make them hold them in OR until we can take them, we get a lot of flack about it but we figure it's the only way we can provide safe patient care because we know if they are being held in the OR with a CRNA in attebndance, they are getting the care they need. I say, pull out some guidelines from CPAN and use them to your advantage!