What do you call a SICU NP? ICU/Critical Care/Surgical NP?

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Hi! Im an OR nurse applying to Acute Care NP school because I want to be a Surgical NP (alongside a surgeon) or an NP in a SICU. Are the NPs inside a SICU called Surgical NPs, Critical Care NP, or ICU NPs?

Both are in the surgical field, so I didnt know and wanna get the correct naming of the position.

Thanks!

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Specializes in NICU.

My guess is that it is region and hospital system dependent. You would be taking the ACNP boards from a board of nursing perspective.

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Specializes in Vascular Neurology and Neurocritical Care.

You'll be an ICU NP since it's unlikely that role calls for OR time. But your specialty will be surgical critical care rather than general/medical critical care. The two obviously ha e plenty of overlap, but the approach to critical care is different between the two and naturally, you'll be dealing with trauma and large, complex surgical cases rather than distributive shock or septic shock from a sacral wound like the MICU peeps. Depending on the set up, there may or may not be Neurosurgical disorders there like subarachnoid and intraparenchymal hemorrhage etc.

Hope that helps clear up the role.

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Specializes in CVICU, MICU, Burn ICU.

One of my preceptors is an ACNP who works for the surgical team. She does do surgery -- perhaps akin to FA (I'm not sure what all FAs do)? She will harvest veins, close, man the robot.... She also follows the services surgical patients and performs procedures. There is not as much medical management for her as there would be if she worked for the hospital as an ICU intensivist. So, I think it really depends on which service you actually work with/for.

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Specializes in Critical Care.

I’ve known a Trauma NP, they worked the trauma service (ICU and flood traumas), they also did outpatient clinic follow up, and (as if not already busy) would scrub in the OR and assist with prep, skin graft, debridement.

Myself, I am a NP in a surgical ICU. The name is really irrelevant, as mentioned it varies, ICU NP, advanced practice provider (APP), Critical care NP (CCNP). I don’t think the name implies if you are in the OR or not.

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Specializes in ACNP-BC, Adult Critical Care, Cardiology.
On 12/9/2019 at 7:33 PM, scrubulator said:

Hi! Im an OR nurse applying to Acute Care NP school because I want to be a Surgical NP (alongside a surgeon) or an NP in a SICU. Are the NPs inside a SICU called Surgical NPs, Critical Care NP, or ICU NPs?

Both are in the surgical field, so I didnt know and wanna get the correct naming of the position.

Thanks!

As already mentioned, this is going to vary based on the specific hospital. Typically, NP's who are hired in by a surgical subspecialty will be asked to function within the spectrum of settings the surgeon sees his or her patients - that can include seeing preop patients in the clinic, assisting in the surgery itself (for some), following up on the patient in the PACU or SICU, all the way to transfer to floor, discharge, and clinic follow-up. That would be an ideal role but again there would variations in that pattern. You may be referred to as the NP for General Surgery or Colorectal Surgery or Hepato-biliary Surgery, etc depending on the subspecialty you work under.

SICU's are not all the same. In Trauma Centers, you may see a great deal of traumas on top of the bread and butter ACS (Acute Care Surgery) patients who had abdominal surgeries. In hospitals with a high cancer population, you will see Gyn-Onc, Surg-Onc, ENT cases in the SICU. Transplant centers have post solid organ transplants in their SICU's (mainly livers). The SICU is typically the purview of the intensivist and in many places that intensivist is not always a surgeon (in ours, they are a combo of surgeons and anesthesiologists with Critical Care training). The NP's who work with these physicians only work in the SICU and are mostly referred to as Critical Care NP's.

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Specializes in CTICU.

Surgical PAs typically go to the OR. Critical care NPs just work ICU.

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In my experience, SICU NP/PAs are critical care. They don't scrub in the OR, go to clinic, etc. NP/PAs hired into surgical services who scrub in the OR would be surgical.

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