TheCaptain

The poster above covered the majority of the skills you will learn, I would add splints and wound care (irrigation, skin prep) to that list depending on your facility. One hospital where I work does not allow techs to splint but my main job does. Our techs are also trained to place IVs (most are EMTs) and honestly are better at it than most of the nurses. Again that depends on your facility though.

I'm looking at Grand Canyon University there is a one day on campus required in Arizona. Not sure if they do Louisiana but check!!!

I'm not sure you actually read my post, no where did I say anything about treating a patient badly or that I fail to care for my patients appropriately even though they sometimes treat us badly. I instead gave the OP a scientifically valid reason why pain should be addressed and might be much worse than it appears on the surface to an observer. Something that resonated with me and gave me a better understanding of how chronic pain patients perceived pain levels might work. I have never treated a patient with anything less than professionalism regardless of their history or bad behavior towards me. My entire reply was for the OP because I understand the frustration that can be encountered in that type of situation (although the OP was not a great example) and how we can change our thinking to understand the problem from a scientific, factual perspective and treat appropriately.

We use a surgical mask for spitters and usually geodon, haldol, ativan... lol If they are especially bad we get a spit hood from EMS or police since the police are usually on site.

Heron, my post had nothing to do with you. I read most of the posts, I was speaking in broad terms of nurses I have dealt with in my experience, usually new and not quite experienced enough to know that patients do sometimes lie, steal, shoot up and manipulate and in the context of the discussion above. I simply contributed a view from the ER perspective, the floor and some research that I have read. If you feel offended by that then please skip my post. Have a nice day.

Just my two cents but here goes lol. First this is going to be a sore subject for anyone who has ever sought pain relief for a legitimate complaint or chronic pain, especially if their treatment was sub par. I get that and I am in no way referencing them below except where noted. I work in the ER. I know "pain is whatever the patient says it is" but to pretend that drug seeking does not exist is just as narrow minded as believing that a person with a drug addiction can't have a physiological cause for pain. That said, I would rather give ten addicts pain meds because they lied about their pain than leave one person suffer. I work in emergency care, I don't work in rehab, I provide stabilization for emergent conditions, I can't cure chronic problems. I can refer, suggest, offer help but I can't make someone decide to get clean so I'm not going to try. I will be happy to assist them if they come seeking help for withdrawals or transfer to to an appropriate facility when THEY decide to get clean but until then there is little to nothing that we can do. Yes it is a drain on our resources, yes it is frustrating when there is a high probability someone is faking a complaint, filling a room and I have legitimately sick people sitting in the hallways or waiting room for hours but that isn't up to me to decide. It happens and I choose not to waste my energy worrying about it. I care about helping people that want or need my help. If my patient doesn't want to help themselves I refuse to care more about their long term well being than they do. I have my limits with all patients. Don't lie to us, we will find out. They also do not get to abuse me verbally or abuse my staff. I have had multiple patients who have become physically or verbally abusive if they did not receive the drug or amount they wanted and luckily I have a great team so when that occurs I have about 6 people in the room helping the patient decide that they either want to limit their belligerent behavior or leave. When I worked the floor I honestly became quite jaded by our large population of IV drug abusers who shot up with dirty needles or contaminated drugs and then required 6 weeks of inpatient antibiotics to treat the infection they shot in their own veins. Most patients would go home with a PICC line and a home health nurse but you just can't send an IV drug user home with a PICC. I have caught them trying to put heroin and meth in their lines. I have had nurses physically assaulted and threatened when the Dr. decreased their pain meds. I have had to remove sharps containers from the room because they were breaking them and digging through them. I have been livid when administration was more worried about the patient being happy than keeping them alive or the staff safe. I lasted about a year and couldn't take anymore and still have an ounce of compassion left. The turning point for me was reading a study about how narcotic use changes that brain. We all know that people build a tolerance to opioid medication. That is simply a physical fact. What I never realized is that (according to this article at least) one of the physiological changes in tolerance is that the brain adds more pain receptors. More pain receptors = more pain felt for the same stimuli. If that is correct a chronic opioid abuser can have excruciating pain from something that that a non opioid user might have only mild discomfort from due to the difference in pain receptor numbers.The effects of that chronic and severe pain have been well described in the posts above. Depression, despair, anxiety, insomnia. Basically people trying to just get high have rewired their brains so that even mild pain causes extreme discomfort (sadly it has probably also happened to a lot of legit chronic pain patients too but in a smaller way). This increased pain will last a lifetime and has to be taken into consideration when treating patients who have previously used narcotics, legitimately or not. This really changed my outlook on the self reported pain of patients and I have given up trying to estimate how much pain a given condition "should" cause. Again, kind of a vent but also my two cents...