PCnurse88

I used: 1) Ace the PCCN You Can Do It, review questions by Nicole Kupchick 2) AACN's Essentials of Progressive Care Nursing 3) PCCN Exam Practice Questions by Mometrix 4) The AACN's progressive care nurse review course, with accompanying printable ha...

Hi! I have an auditory processing disorder. I'm not hearing impaired by any means, I have EXCELLENT hearing, but my brain does not filter out background noise like most peoples. This makes talking on the phone nearly impossible for me. I have to be i...

I actually recommend not doing any certifications other than maybe BLS. This is for a few reasons: 1) Many hospitals will pay for you to do certifications, especially if it's required. If they don't pay for it, they may offer bonuses or partial reimb...

I used to think like that, too. I drove an hour and a half one way to my first nursing job for 15 months before I finally had to change to a hospital closer to home. I was literally falling asleep driving home on the busiest highway in my state. Now ...

The very first time I did CPR the patient woke up and immediately grabbed me while I was doing compressions. I was so shocked the only reason I didn't fall off the bed was because the chief resident was standing next to me and had a hand on my back t...

Our med students graduated this week, so we had a couple luncheons and parties for them. It was in the bulletin, we got emails about "hugging a med student!", whole shebang. The managers did something individually for their own units (candy, box of ...

I've had enough vaccines to cover like 3 normal people. Chicken pox 3 times, MMR I think 4, hep series a few times... nothing sticks. My nursing school made me do the entire series over. My first and current RN jobs accepted vaccination records. My p...

I get gel manicures sometimes and they typically last me almost 3 weeks before the first chip, which is when I take them off. Regular nail polish comes off within a day so I don't even bother, unless it's for a very specific event and I'm off work (i...

It would probably vary hospital to hospital. Our cath lab nurses are definitely considered critical care nurses / it's considered a critical care "unit". There is a hospital nearby that is somewhat of a back up cath lab and their facility does not co...

You've been there 1.5 years? I'd consider myself lucky if I was given that long before they made me charge! Our facility makes everyone do charge at least a couple times, usually around the 1 year mark but sometimes earlier (I was a new grad with 8 m...

AACN's Essentials of Progressive Care Nursing is a good book, but it isn't a question book. "Ace the PCCN You Can Do It" by Nicole Kupchik was extremely helpful, as was the AACN's online course review. The review was 13 hours long and came with hando...

My (adult) unit recently implemented this and it's going terribly. People are on oxygen for DAYS longer than they need to be because we can't titrate without a new O2 order, but the residents take a million years to put orders in. Night shift no long...

I disagree. The blocks can be challenging at first, and there are plenty of things (not necessarily tele) that I go home and look up. We cannot possibly know everything about the medical field, especially when we are new or when it is something we do...

I had all 265 questions with my NCLEX too- horrible. I cried through probably the last 100 questions, and then sobbed my whole way home - probably shouldn't have been on the highway! All of my friends had passed (my ATT was delayed due to getting my ...

If you join an organization (like AACN, AMSN, or whatever your specialty is), sometimes they give free CEUs. All of mine are free, and my membership counts towards my clinical ladder. Obviously the membership itself can get a little pricey but it was...

I once had a fellow yell at me in the patient's room, in front of another nurse and the patient's family. At the time I was too shocked to do anything for various reasons -in front of a patient and family? yelling? and it ended up being the doctor re...

I asked this exact question when we added NIHSS to our charting, and I was told by neurologists and by the NIHSS educator that this would get a score of 4. We were told the only reason to score "untestable" was amputation or intubated & sedated- ...

Are you leaving the hospital, or just the unit? I left Hospital A medsurg to go to Hospital B medsurg and actually took a $6/hr paycut. My benefits were much better and instead of traveling 50 miles one way I was traveling 15 minutes, so that plus ot...

Uh, if you think your patient has a retained tampon, I would hope you'd be spreading her legs IMMEDIATELY to check and calling the doc ASAP as this could very quickly lead to TSS, sepsis, and/or death. I'm not an OB nurse, but if she's POD 5, wouldn...

Agreed, it varies facility to facility. At my per diem, the nurse has to help the patient fill out the MRI screening; at my full-time, it is the job of the MRI tech. Pre-op checklist falls to the night shift nurse who takes care of them the midnight ...

I agree, 4 weeks is a horrible thing for a new grad. It's not nearly enough time to learn everything you need to do, nor enough time for you to feel comfortable on the unit. That being said... I wouldn't quit. I would use those 4 weeks to immerse mys...

1) Use the search feature here on AN because there are literally millions of threads with great advice. 2) To add to those lists and emphasize some stuff, find a brain sheet that works for you. You may need to adjust once you're taking patients; when...

I really want to, but I'm not sure if it will happen. Now is a really poor time to ask my manager about it for hospital-issue reasons, plus it will be during the first month of the semester. So undecided!

Most of the time we don't use SCDs in patients with blood clots or with a history of clots because they are already on blood thinners. My hospital exclusively uses heparin drips for a diagnosis of DVT/PE unless there's a heparin allergy or HIT so no ...

The AMSN website has a few suggestions for course materials. I'm also studying for my exam, so I don't know which ones will be better for passing as I haven't tested, but I'm using and/or looking into the following based on AMSN's recommendations: Mo...