Same day care unit Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, CA

Banana nut, BSN, RN, EMT-B · Nov 19, 2019

Ive done rotation there, it's lots of fun! You prep and preop daily scheduled diagnostic cardiac caths, you also do moderate sedation and help with elective cardioversion and you assist writh lynxis placement for afib monitoring, so you get sterile and prep for the placement ofther lynxis. You also help with 3D TEE. You also act as an out pt infusion clinic for people on long term iv therapy, so you end up changing central line dressings quite a bit and set up infusion. There's actually 3 different areas to the SDC unit, Interventional ICU, a preop cath prep area and actual beds like a med surg unit for pts that don't end up going home if they Crumpin cath. You go back and forth between the 3 from what i remember. The IICU is where you do the cardioversions, tee, lynxis placement and i think a few other things. But that's the gist of it. Lots of fun, you stay busy, lots of IVs, and you get to be get to help scrub in with sterile procedures and lots of other stuff. Hope this helped.

dma13 · Nov 20, 2019

Wow thanks for the great feedback! Sounds like an interesting unit, I like how there's 3 parts to it...would you say it's fast paced? How are the nurse / patient ratios?

I'm coming from an ICU background so I'm used to have 1-2 patients max, wondering if I could handle the transition. Thanks again!

Banana nut, BSN, RN, EMT-B · Nov 20, 2019

I think it depends on where you are at, and how many prepare are scheduled for procedures that day. It can sometimes be a hurry up and wait scenario, where you are getting everything ready for the scheduled procedure then down time till Anastasia and cardiologist are at because then it's bing bang boom and they are done and your recovering them then d/c or transfer to the floor. in the interventional ICU when doing a procedure it's kind of 1:1 thing until they recover and are stable. Once complete they go to one of the medical beds and then they are discharged. Also i don't think you bounce around all 3 units in a day. You will be in one of the pods ther whole day then it switches or something similar to that, don't quote me though.

In the preop cath prep area you are doing admission assessments starting an iv and fluids and then recovering them when they get out of the procedure. Generally everyone's stable and the goal is to keep then stable so your can have i think maybe 3 or 4 at a time i believe but it's very out patient based, everyone is pretty much ambulatory and you try to get them out the same day so there is no real routine med pass and everyone's npo advance as tol and non infectious so it all generally goes very smoothly. They can crump and the IICU or OR or cath lab so the iicu generally has the capacity to stabilize an airway hemodynamics if needed but it's not like everyone's vented with art lines, and cvp and it's a very procedural focused position. I did only a handful of shifts maybe 7 or 8 on the unit but i really enjoyed my time there. And once all of The scheduled pt are done you just clean up and wait until they close for the day. I think they chose at 4 or 5pm but i could be wrong. Hope this helped feel free to ask any other qs