agcaruso

I agree that novice and experience are better adjectives. Working around many novice RN's I've found that they often have qualities that experienced RN often loose. They often have a strong desire to learn and have a more current grasp on the literature. They haven't experienced cargiver fatigue and are often more caring. The term baby nurse makes it sound like they just cry, smile and poop and have to be taken care of all the time.

That is mean and stupid what they did to you. I'm sorry you had to go through it. I also agree that they probably did you a favor. You don't want to work at a place that treats their new hires like that. Even if you appealed and got back my guess is it wouldn't be a good experience.

It sounds like CCRN means something different where you are it. Here you can't test for the CCRN without ICU experience. Our CCRN is just an exam through the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN). All you have to do is prove you've worked enough hours in the ICU and pass the test. The test is 150 questions from different area of critical care nursing. The AACN website has more information. Nurse anesthestia is masters prepared nurse that takes ~3 years of full time study to complete. It prepares you to work in the OR not the ICU. I was hired into ICU as a new grad and it worked out well for me. My guess is that any hospital that sponsors you here would want to sponsor you in an area you have experience in already, but there are cetianly needs here. Good luck!

He really looks unprofessional documenting that nonsense in a patients chart. Hopefully he'll be reprimanded by the higher ups for that as well. The other problem with this situation is that you have to make so many calls only to get blown off twice and to have the issue resolved the next day. We spend way too much time in nursing tracking down someone who will do what is right for the patient.

I have two thoughts. One I think this discussion is good. Far to often in nursing we have situations where everyone knows something is wrong but no one wants to talk about it because they don't want to implicated as a bad nurse. If we don't talk about the temptation to become sloppy then more people are going to become sloppy. As a health care system we are far more concerned with documentation than patient care. So there is always a push when the assignment is busy to sacrifice assessment time for documentation time. It doesn't have to happen that way. As many people pointed out you can do a pretty quick and through assessment. The other problem is these nurses who slowly stop doing assessments fall into a hole. They start to loose those assessment skills and therefore their assessment is less useful and even less of a priority. For example the difference between crackles and rhonchi can be hard to distinguish. So we need to be aware of this and keep teaching these basic skills for those who want to become better nurses.

That was really nice. I often forget the power of saying thank you. It is this powerful as a third party observer I can imagine it is much more so as the recipient of such an event. It reminds me that I need to be thank people at my hospital when they do go work.

Awesome. Keep learning. Focus on what you love about your job.

I don't see the problem on looking up a patient of yours that is transfered to another unit (as in the previous posters example). We can't learn without feedback about how our actions effect the patient. As long as you don't know the patient personally before they were your patient and you aren't using the informaiton you are gathering to harm them, I think following up should be encouraged.

Good post. I hope we all hear more things like this. Working at a teaching hospital I've seen both sides with the residents. The ones who know their stuff work well with the nursing staff. The ones that are overwhelmed are often rude and don't listen to the nurses because they don't want to appear to be someone who has to listen to nurses to make decisions.

In most cases the degree means more than the certification but the certification is far easier to achieve. A PhD takes years even if you are doing it full time. You may be able to get certified in an area you know after studying for an hour a day for a few months. Certification allows you to stay in your current job and in many cases get paid more for it. I got the test paid for and a $1/hour raise. You should get a degree if you want to get a new job, PhD's give you skills to research and work in academia. The focus of your PhD should be whatever you are passionate about researching. Hope that helps.

Many nurses I know have gotten into the habit of working overtime and have gotten used to a lifestyle that can only be supported by working overtime (buying a more expensive house being the biggest trap). Then when life gets busier with kids, or they simply get tired of working more then they want to stop but cannot due to finances. This is a trap that I've always been on guard against. I went into nursing in part due to the flexibility of it. I wanted to be able to work part time if I needed to, to be able to take a week off without taking a day off. I don't want to loose what I was looking for when I got into nursing just for a bigger house to clean.

Thanks for the article. This is going to sound selfish in response to the article but I also like working on Thanksgiving. It is a nice, usually a little slow, day at work. Everyone at work seems upbeat despite having to work. The patients are more grateful for my presence there. Don't get me wrong I'd like to be with my family but there are also hard parts about spending extending time with family that I skip by working.

Bluebolt, I am just joining a rapid response team and I am looking to implement standing orders for the RRN's. I was wondering if you could send me the standing orders your hospital uses for the CAT so I can use those as a blueprint.

This is a wonderful and detailed description of your job. I just took a rapid response job a month ago and we currently do not have any standing orders. I was wondering if you would share those standing orders with me so I can work to get them implemented here.