Sloan RN

If the patient threw up, Clipboard Guy would only get it if he touched the emesis and then touched his eyes/nose/mouth. Or maybe if the patient ripped her Hazmat suit off and then threw up directly on his face. I get Ebola is scary for everyone, but ...

Which one is the patient? The guy in yellow? I watched a documentary about Ebola in Africa the other day and the Doctors Without Borders people don't wear PPE if they are outside the infectious zone of the hospital...more than 6 feet away from the pa...

16 Doctors Without Borders staff have contracted Ebola during the current outbreak, and that info is coming from the organization itself. There have been 404 cases of Ebola in healthcare workers, and 232 have died. TWO of them contracted it in the U...

So here are a few studies about Ebola and similar viruses on surfaces: Sagripanti JL, Rom AM, Holland LE. Persistence in darkness of virulent alphaviruses, Ebola virus, and Lassa virus deposited on solid surfaces. Arch Virol2010; 155:2035-203 Sagri...

Just read the statement from NNU on behalf of the Texas nurses ( Statement by RN’s at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital as provided to National Nurses United | National Nurses United ) and it's pretty clear what the breach was.... "For their necks, ...

I think my individual responsibility as a nurse in this Ebola situation is to a) be familiar with my hospital's plans for handling Ebola and b) be well-informed about the disease itself so I can help educate people who ask me about it. I've been pre...

Probably won't affect how students are taught too much. As far as triage goes, everyone is being told to ask every patient whether they've had a fever and where they've been traveling in the past month. If the patient has a fever AND has been traveli...

Nurses are ethically bound to educate themselves using reliable sources and not media hype or misinformation. Restricting travel would be extraordinarily difficult. Keep in mind you would be attempting to quarantine over 20 million people for a dise...

I'll just cut and paste what I put in another thread: A word on Hazmat suits. Have you ever used one? Do you have any idea how to use one? My hospital has chosen not to use them if we were to get an Ebola patient because: 1. They open in the front. I...

What exactly is awful about the CDC site? I assume you mean the one for healthcare professionals: Information for Health Care Workers | Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever | CDC Have you read the UpToDate articles? There are two, and they are free to the public ...

I'm disappointed in the lack of general research of some reading this thread. If healthcare professionals like us are getting their information on Ebola from the news, we're all screwed. Everybody should be reading reliable sources...UpToDate, CDC, W...

I think you need to do some more research. If you listened to or read transcripts from the CDC's conference call for healthcare professionals where they had doctors from both Nebraska and Emory (the two hospitals with special biocontainment units who...

Thanks for taking the time to take notes and post them here! So interesting. I'll be interested to see specifically what they say about dialysis and intubation...I realize those are high-risk procedures, but it seems unethical to withhold them from a...

Take notes and post back here, I'll be at work and unable to listen but would love to know what is said. One of the most interesting things out of Emory is that they tested various surfaces in Ebola patients' rooms and found NO Ebola anywhere. This i...

Ebola is spread by contact, like RSV. The reason you see stuff like Hazmat suits on the news is due to an abundance of caution. At my hospital the recommendation is booties, a surgical gown (they're waterproof unlike our typical isolation gowns), an ...

You don't turn or reposition your ECMO patients? We do. Patients who are big enough go in a KinAir bed if possible, otherwise kids are in our standard PICU bed (which has some pressure-reduction technology) or a crib. We use Z-flows and pillows for p...

It's always kinda weird for me to hear other PICU nurses being taken aback by family members sleeping in the rooms because it's always been the norm where I work. There are 3 people allowed in the room during the day (before 2100)...of course adjustm...

I've used a dressing with a securement component similar to this: Percutaneous Drainage Catheter Fastener and it was awesome. That's not the exact dressing, but it's close. The downside is that the doc who placed it didn't suture it in because of the...

Hi everyone, I'm hoping that some of you work in the PICU at CHOP and Boston Children's, or knows someone who does. I'm looking for information on their staffing model to compare it to lower-ranked PICUs in the nation. Specifically, I'm looking for: ...

Is your hospital offering to house staff that are pulling extra shifts? I haven't experienced a direct-hit natural disaster like this before, but my hospital has faced a few extraordinary weather situations where they've either set up cots and rollaw...

Most common bedside procedures on my unit: intubation, extubation, central line placement, arterial line placement, chest tube insertion, EVD placement. That's just a short list of the most common ones I can think of...there are obviously less common...

Your orientation is only 8 weeks?! I agree with previous posters, that's really short...new grads on my unit are on orientation for 4-6 months. How's the retention of new grad hires on your unit? Do a lot of them leave shortly after coming off orient...

Get the BSN. It'll cost more money and more time, but you'll make more money and have much more employment opportunities when you graduate. If you want to work in critical care, don't even consider anything else! There are some ADNs in the ICU I work...

I cannot even imagine what those poor patients and nurses had to deal with. From what I've been able to read it sounds like everyone survived; that alone is a miracle to me. I can't imagine if this happened in my PICU/PCICU, where a majority of the p...

We get weekly weights on our patients (it's a medical PICU; the patients in the cardiac PICU might get daily weights, I don't know). Even then, if our patient is too unstable to be safely weighed, we can ask the physician for an order that says it's ...