Student Nurse ICU Question

GrumpyRN, NP · Jun 13, 2018

Not a critical care nurse so not going to confuse the issue with my thoughts but... What does NQN stand for? Never heard of it.

AlexMaclean · Jun 13, 2018

It just means newly qualified nurse x

allnurses Guide · Jun 13, 2018

There is so much about critical care and the drugs used it would be difficult to know where to start.

There are the obvious anaesthetic gents, inotropes, anti microbial, then there will be the curve ball which you may only ever see once in your career.

My advice would be focus on the patient, forget the machines, drips, interventions and concentrate on a solid patient assessment, it was the most valuable advice I had.

The bits attached can prove a distraction and remove the humanity from your patient, it can be easy to lose touch with the emotions that ward nurses experience because our patients can be so sick you get pulled into the complexity of critical care, it's when that happens we forget the dignity we should afford to those patients.

I loved every minute of critical care nursing, it's a great career and was an incredible base to launch a nursing career

spacemonkey15 · Jun 14, 2018

There is so much about critical care and the drugs used it would be difficult to know where to start.
There are the obvious anaesthetic gents, inotropes, anti microbial, then there will be the curve ball which you may only ever see once in your career.
My advice would be focus on the patient, forget the machines, drips, interventions and concentrate on a solid patient assessment, it was the most valuable advice I had.
The bits attached can prove a distraction and remove the humanity from your patient, it can be easy to lose touch with the emotions that ward nurses experience because our patients can be so sick you get pulled into the complexity of critical care, it's when that happens we forget the dignity we should afford to those patients.
I loved every minute of critical care nursing, it's a great career and was an incredible base to launch a nursing career

I completely agree with the above comment. I wouldn't worry too much about trying to get ahead by learning some of the complexities of ITU. You'll be an NQ nurse and expectations of you will reflect this.

Make the most of your time off, while your going to be at the bottom of a very steep learning curve, you'll be well supported through this time. If you feel you have to read anything, just keep yourself clued up on A&P, the ITU stuff makes much morse sense when you can relate it to what's happening in front of you.

HandmadeRN · Jun 23, 2018

Whilst it's over ten years ago that I qualified, when I started as nurse we had a preceptorship programme at our hospital. We would have regular study days and had competencies that we needed to achieve. It was a bit like being a student nurse again but being paid and having more responsibility! And it's no different today. At the hospital where I work, the newly qualified nurses are really spoilt with the amount of training opportunities that are thrown at them! Makes my preceptorship look paltry in comparison :-)

Every unit will differ on how long you are supernumerary for but I think I worked 2 weeks supernumerary to begin with and I had Cardiac HDU experience previously. It might be longer for you as you'll likely be waiting for your pin. You also probably won't be administering meds for a while as a lot of Trusts require you to pass a drugs exam before you can administer and that's usually several months after you start. ITUs also always tend to have lots of practice educators attached to them.

As for reading up on the subject - a good understanding of anatomy and physiology is vital. It makes it so much easier for you to understand why you administer some medications and not others.

As you are still a student it might be worth checking out your library for ITU nursing books or journals. You'll still be able to access journals for free whilst you are there, so use it!

There's no harm in reading around the subject and understanding why we do certain tasks in ITU even for basic care. I.e. Oral hygiene, suctioning, assessing sedation, sedation holds etc... You'll likely learn all of this in your first few months anyway so no pressure! Lastly, ECG waveforms. Take the time now to learn how to recognise different rhythms!

osceteacher · Jun 27, 2018

Pre Course Learning

These were designed for just this, the workbooks are part of our ICU preceptorship.

As others have said though, you'll be expected to work at a NQN level for a while and get plenty of experience, hopefully your ICU has a robust program in place.