Getting into the Emergency department

Nurses General Nursing

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Hello all, I am interested in transferring into the emergency department. I've been an nurse about 4 years, the last 2 years in cardiac ICU. BSN, CCRN.

I was recently called for an interview, but I was a bit surprised at the amount of training needed. I know ICU and ED are two different beasts and a lot of training is going to be needed.

It was a total of 14 weeks of training total, through classroom training and precepting. I didn't even train that long to get into the ICU. I am still very interested, but I am just curious if this is the standard everywhere.

trust me, after 14 weeks you're gonna want a lot more

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Specializes in NICU.

I am sure the nurse taking care of the Ebola patient had wished for more orientation.You are fortunate they are willing to offer you 14 weeks,hopefully they are good ones,not just using you as back fill staff.Good luck to you.

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Specializes in Adult and pediatric emergency and critical care.

How long orientation lasts depends on the background of our new hires, but we go up to 5 months for some nurses. At a minimum our ED nurses need to have ACLS, PALS, NIHSS, all of our in house training, and either ENPC or TNCC (for peds ED and adult ED respectively, both are required by 6 months) in order to come off of orientation.

We have some nurses who are cross trained from the ICU, PICU, BMT, or other units and don't have a 'full' orientation. These nurses won't have the same assignments as our core ED nurses, and depending on their training may not be able to take codes, STEMIs, trauma, triage, et cetera. These nurses must still have the same certifications and a minimum of 3 shifts although that is even very rare.

The ED is like nothing else, take every moment of training that you can get.

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Specializes in ED, Pedi Vasc access, Paramedic serving 6 towns.

Also remember the ER is different in that you won't have all sick patients, actually many of them don't even need to be there!!! You will also deal with A LOT of abdominal pain and chest pain, most of the time it can get pretty boring! Last, but not least get ready for psych patients because there are always plenty of them, sometimes you have them for days!!! You may like it, but this is one of the many reasons I left the ER, mainly because of understaffing and an exorbitant amount of psych patients, and psych isn't my thing! I find them to be VERY NEEDY and DRAINING. My unit decided when they redid the ER to isolate all the psych patients into one area and stick one nurse with them all (12 beds), I refused to take more then 6 or 7. A nurse got injured one day being alone and they finally realized they needed to staff it better.

Annie

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I'm sure you're smart enough to do it, but my experience suggests that ICU nurses don't do well in the ED and emergency nurses don't transition easily to critical care.

I'll call report and they'll ask me what condition the pt's *** is in. Baby, I'm not looking at anybody's *** unless I have to. And then they ask a bunch of irrelevant nit picking questions.

Here's the thing. An ICU RN has two patients. If I have a patient going to the ICU, I'll have another one or two high acuity patients at minimum and can go up to four or five, and if one of the six or seven nurses working the room is on break or travelling with a patient we have to cover those two or four patients. If I have moderate acuity patients I might have six in rooms and two or three more in the hallway and my partner is on break so I'm covering those eight or ten, or maybe it's the lower acuity/fast track area (we combine that with pediatrics and women's health issues) and it's just moving people in and out of rooms as fast as you can or maybe it's triage and you're telling people that if they're breathing and it's not a STEMI or an acute stroke and they're not shot in head they'll be waiting three or four hours for a room and another couple hours for someone to pick up a chart. And then you sit on all that while you wait hours or days for inpatient beds.

If you can do that, it's really not that hard. Seriously, it's an easy job. It's just busy. You can't do head-to-toe assessments on everybody.

I'd expect your experience to translate into a shorter orientation, you already have ACLS, and will eventually need TNCC and ENPC but those are no big deal.

I don't want to put you off the idea, but know that it's just a completely different animal, Good luck.

edit: apparently I can't post *** on this forum, let's use 'bottom'

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