suga_junkie

Yes, you're right. In Australia to work in maternity areas you must be a midwife. It's not a different educational path here, you may do a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, then do a post graduate degree to specialise in midwifery. Most Aus midwives were RNs first, there's not many universities that do midwifery only degrees (you can do a double degree though).

Yep, tapatalk isn't working for me either anymore. I will probably stop coming to allnurses, the website is that bad. I hate it. It's a shame because I have been reading the forums daily for years now and I will miss it.

300mcgs in 4-5 hrs doesn't sound excessive to me. It's not like you gave it in one go. I assume you were assessing her and she wasn't becoming really sedated/ showing signs of respiratory depression. Fentanyl had a fairly short half life also.

If the narcan didn't work then it wasn't the fentanyl. Sounds like the surgeon is trying to deflect responsibility for post op complications. Has she had any scans?

Yup, I feel safe but I live in Australia. We have almost no gun crime and zero mass shootings since gun control laws were changed in 1996. Obviously we still get intoxicated or mentally ill people throwing punches etc but nothing close to the gun or knife crime described by previous posters.

Hough

Are you a nurse or a nursing student? If not, then why are you on the allNURSES forum? This is a place for nurses to discuss issues and vent in a safe, (fairly) anonymous arena. This allows us to blow off steam so we can provide excellent, unbiased care for you/your family/friends/society in general, even if they happen to be rude, obnoxious or just all round nasty people. Your advice as a non-nurse is neither helpful nor solicited.

We've discovered a few large ovarian masses during routine post void bladder scanning in post op spinal patients. Usually after re-insertions of catheters with minimal output despite large amounts of fluid showing up on the bladder scans, we've sent these women for ultrasounds/CTs to find that it was an ovarian mass showing up on the bladder scanners.

- inserting IVs/taking blood, including from art lines/CVCs etc - lumbar drains/ EVDs - maintaining fluid balance charts (I & Os) on people with lots of infusions/drains etc (appeals to my OCD side haha) - complex gross wound dressings (but not everyday!)

This. Every human being deserves to receive compassionate, unbiased, competent nursing care. We care for people at their most vulnerable, words and attitudes can do a lot of damage. Anyone who cannot or will not leave their religious beliefs/prejudices/personal opinions at home has NO business being a nurse. Period.

Not that I know of. We have respiratory physiotherapists though. They get patients up and moving, do deep breathing/coughing exercises, peak flow measurements, chest physio, incentive spirometery etc etc. They don't do any medications though, definitely don't touch vents, do ABGs, suction patients or administer 02 without the consulting the RN etc. They are physiotherapists specializing in the respiratory system. Nurses do all of the respiratory tasks as resp physios only see a select few patients and only once a day at the most.

I live in Australia, we do not have RTs. Nurses do all the respiratory stuff including manage patients on ventilators. As far as I know, RTs only exist in North America.

At my hospital the orthopods are probably worse than the neurosurgeons. We have one or two neurosurgeons who will very occasionally yell and swear, usually when something goes really wrong with one of their patients (can't take any hint of criticism I guess). But most of them are friendly, joke with us, even buy us ward Christmas presents or come to our nurse's ball and mingle. My biggest beef with some of our surgeons is when they don't answer their phones (or get back to us for hours after leaving a message), but that's another story!

Our hospital doesn't do overhead pages. We press the emergency bell to alert ward staff, someone calls the emergency line and this sends pages to the MET call team (in ICU), the duty nurse managers, PCAs and resident doctors. It works well, usually the residents are there in 2-3 mins and the MET call team in about 3-5 mins.

I've always been surprised at how US nurses usually refer to drugs by their brand names. I'm often stumped by meds they're talking about until I google them and find out the generic name. I'd bet you'd know almost all those drugs if the generic name was used! Here in Australia we almost always use generic names to avoid confusion. Some common drugs have 3+ different brand names!