Topics About 'Picu'.
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Found 20 results
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While the practice of medicine itself has been present throughout essentially all of human history, it is only within the last century that the specialty of critical care has been cultivated. Increasing medical advancement has brought with it more op...
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RSV. Those three little letters are enough to strike terror in the hearts of PICU nurses everywhere. It's like a bad penny, turning up without fail every autumn; by mid-winter, virtually every PICU in the northern hemisphere has admitted at least one...
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There has been a lot written in recent years about moral distress in health care. With the rapid pace of technological change it has become commonplace for patients to survive injuries and illnesses that less than a decade ago would have ended their ...
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I've lost count of the times I've heard that exclamation from another nurse. I've also forgotten how many times I've heard, "I just don't know how you do it," not only from other nurses but from friends, casual acquaintances and family. But I don't k...
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Born with a cardiac anomaly, the family immediately noticed something was "wrong" with their child, but they did not know what. Thus began their journey to another country - our country - our state and our hospital - desperately seeking help. During ...
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There have been many patients over the years who have taught me something, about nursing, about critical care, about myself, about the human spirit. Each one has touched me in some way and I will never forget them; hopefully, I won't forget the lesso...
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It used to be that children admitted to the PICU following a drug ingestion had gotten into Grandma's purse, or climbed up on the bathroom sink, or maybe tasted something from under the kitchen sink. Older kids might have swallowed a handful of Tylen...
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It has been a particularly harsh summer for me and the nurses I work with. I have had seven of my patients pass away, either on my shift when I was their nurse, or on a different shift. I have advocated for my patient to grieving parents who were lef...
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What makes a better Pediatric Nurse?I have often thought about this very question. Are you a better pediatric nurse if you are a mom or if you have skills and extra education?? I became a pediatric nurse in 1995 and have worked in pediatrics, PICU, N...
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Let's pretend you're working on a pediatric inpatient unit and one of your patients was admitted for the ubiquitous and poorly-defined failure-to-thrive syndrome. This little kiddo is 5 months old and weighs 4 kg, so obviously not a robust and chubby...
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One night as the charge nurse working in a Pediatric Intensive Care unit for a Level I trauma center, I got a call from the ER. It was the kind of call that immediately sends your adrenal glands into overdrive. "We have two children coming in with mu...
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As nurses, it's our job to make patients better, to improve their lives in some way. For acute care nurses, the goal is to help patients recover from an illness, surgery, or accident. Rehab nurses help patients reach their highest level of functionin...
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Each of us brings our own particular personalities, opinions and experiences to the workplace and we all deal with issues in our own ways. Coping mechanisms are as individual as fingerprints. Some nurses have left their units and others have left the...
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PICU nurses are no strangers to the seizing child. There are many causes of seizure disorder in the pediatric population and some are much more common than others. The usual suspects are the infamous and usually not serious febrile seizure, CNS injur...
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Case Study #1 - Miss TB and Ecstasy
TB, age 15, attended a wedding in a small rural community about an hour's drive from a children's hospital. She and 8 other wedding-goers were given some pills by a family member, with the aim of making the par...
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We all know nurses who exhibit signs of burnout. Everyone will have different reasons for their behaviour, and moral distress is often on the list. What does burnout look like? It has many faces, and no two individuals will have the same signs and sy...
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Life as a Pediatric nurse can be very difficult at times. I remember being in nursing school and helping to participate in two different adult codes within a couple of hours of each other in the ICU. Later that day I went to post conference and recou...
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So, how do you know you're a Pediatric Nurse? Well, other than the typical instances of "knowing you're a nurse"... such as, considering a 5 minute bathroom escape your morning break, excelling at getting and eating your lunch (often while on the pho...
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Every hour or two, I would have to change her diaper. One diaper change was particularly messy. She had a blow-out bowel movement, out the diaper and all over the crib, so I had to change all the linen and clean everything up. Her parents were not th...
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What Are We Looking At?
There are four classes of drugs typically implicated in the rave culture. Stimulants and dissociatives are the two most commonly used agents.
Amphetamines and Stimulants
Methamphetamine (beanies, blue devils, chal...
