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Patients and their families are dealing with a lot of anxiety and stress, and we have the opportunity to be there when people are most vulnerable. Most people, when they come to the emergency department, it’s not a planned visit. Just being there with a patient, or patient’s family, can be healing. It’s so helpful to talk about what happened with someone else who understands.ġ0. When you see something really upsetting, that’s where you lean on your network of other nurses. The hardest cases are when the patient is young. Death is part of the territory but nothing can really prepare you to watch one of your patients die. But you will also see the cardiac arrest who can’t be saved, or the person who has such bad trauma that they bleed out. These days, especially with medical technology, we’re saving more and more people due to the advances in healthcare.
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It helps to be part of a professional association where you can vent to other nurses at the end of the day, or just talk it out with somebody who understands the environment.ĩ. I think everybody just has to put on their armor before coming to work but it does affect you. Patients might call you names, or take out their frustrations by yelling at you. There’s a lot of what we call “violent verbal abuse” in our department. Sometimes, patients will treat you like a punching bag. I’ve taken on students for preceptorships and several of them have been hired in the end, so it’s a good way to make connections and prove you can do the job.Ĩ. Some nursing students also do a preceptorship, where you can shadow a nurse for a few months while you’re still in school. Another way to get a foot in the door is to start as an ER department tech, which offers on-the-job training and can give you the experience you need to be an ER nurse. Some ER nurses start off in intensive care, telemetry, or maternal child health to gain experience before applying to work in the emergency department. The reason is that new nurses take upward of six months to get oriented, so that basically means six months of training before a brand new nurse can start working. Emergency departments don’t always hire nurses straight out of school.
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All of those injuries can be prevented.ħ. For instance, we treat people who were in car crashes but didn’t have their seatbelts on, or children who were not in their car seats, or bicyclists and motorcyclists who weren’t wearing helmets. I’ve seen a lot of things come through the ER doors, and a lot of injuries could’ve been prevented. You will become fanatical about your loved ones' safety. A couple weeks ago, I was on an airplane and wound up taking care of a passenger who was having difficulty breathing after the flight attendants asked if there was a medical professional on board.Ħ. When people know you’re a nurse, everyone wants to know if you can take a look at their rash or help them heal a cut or tell them how to get over a cold. You’re a nurse no matter where you are, even when you’re off the clock. In my institution, we also have on-call times, so you have to sign up for so many hours of on-call every six weeks - beyond your regular shifts - and be prepared to go into work at a moment’s notice.ĥ. I wear a FitBit and I can easily put on 5 miles in a single day. It’s less than a 40-hour workweek, but it’s still exhausting: There’s virtually no downtime and you’re physically on your feet, running around during the entire shift. Traditionally, nurses work 12-hour shifts, three shifts a week. It’s way more work than it looks like on paper. For example, before we give a patient medication, we scan both the patient's ID band and the medications to make sure it’s the correct one, we’ll do a targeted medical history, and review current medications and allergies to make sure there are no problems.Ĥ. Fortunately, there are many safety mechanisms in place to catch potential errors. One minute, you might be drawing blood or starting IVs next, you’ll be checking on someone’s vital signs then you might have to perform CPR on someone. You need to think fast on your feet, because you never know what’s you’re going to be asked to do next. In most emergency departments, only experienced nurses advances certifications perform triage.ģ. A triage nurse will do an “across-the-room survey” to see who needs to be seen immediately and who can wait a little longer. We do get the stereotypical “emergency” cases - heart attacks or trauma victims - but we also see patients who are not able to get care from a primary care physician. Deciding who to treat first is really, really hard.