Acute Care Nurses
"If you ever got shot, you'd truly understand what we do." I can never forget that line, said to me by a friend of mine who works as a nurse, during a heated discussion we once had about how important the role of medical teams in hospitals and healthcare facilities really is. At the time, I saw medical professions as just like any other job — people simply getting paid for their work — while my friend believed you could never compare a field tied to saving people's lives to anything else. I remember she told me the story of a 17-year-old boy who came into the emergency department where she works, hit by a stray bullet lodged in his chest. He wasn't unconscious, and his eyes trembled with fear as he cried in front of them, saying: "Am I actually going to live?" She told me they rushed him into the operating room, and the doctors managed to remove the bullet from his body and give him his life back after he had been just moments away from losing it. However much we talk about what medical professions do, we could never fully give them their due. You know, of course, that in this small world of ours, over the course of our brief lives, nothing can compare to the value of health. Doctors, nurses, and the rest of the medical team are God's hand on this earth — He put them here to be a source of support for us, to look after our health, comfort, and happiness. In this piece, we'll focus specifically on the role played by these angels of mercy in hospitals and medical centers — specifically the nurses who work in the emergency department, since the nurses of this department are tasked with receiving accident victims, patients suffering heart attacks and strokes, women about to give birth, and other emergency cases requiring rapid medical intervention along with surgical and emotional skill. Every moment, every minute, that passes for such patients without intervention from doctors and nurses could cost them their lives — which is why only doctors and nurses with broad experience and high-level skills, who are qualified to respond immediately to such cases, work in this department.
Meet the Writer: Waleed Abo Omiraa
What You'll Actually Do
The core tasks and responsibilities that fill a typical day.
- Analyze the indications, contraindications, risk complications, and cost-benefit tradeoffs of therapeutic interventions.
- Diagnose acute or chronic conditions that could result in rapid physiological deterioration or life-threatening instability.
- Distinguish between normal and abnormal developmental and age-related physiological and behavioral changes in acute, critical, and chronic illness.
- Manage patients' pain relief and sedation by providing pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions, monitoring patients' responses, and changing care plans accordingly.
- Interpret information obtained from electrocardiograms (EKGs) or radiographs (x-rays).
- Perform emergency medical procedures, such as basic cardiac life support (BLS), advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), and other condition-stabilizing interventions.
- Assess urgent and emergent health conditions, using both physiologically and technologically derived data.
- Assess the impact of illnesses or injuries on patients' health, function, growth, development, nutrition, sleep, rest, quality of life, or family, social and educational relationships.
- Collaborate with members of multidisciplinary health care teams to plan, manage, or assess patient treatments.
- Discuss illnesses and treatments with patients and family members.
- Document data related to patients' care, including assessment results, interventions, medications, patient responses, or treatment changes.
- Treat wounds or superficial lacerations.
- Set up, operate, or monitor invasive equipment and devices, such as colostomy or tracheotomy equipment, mechanical ventilators, catheters, gastrointestinal tubes, and central lines.
- Obtain specimens or samples for laboratory work.
- Participate in patients' care meetings and conferences.
- Administer blood and blood product transfusions or intravenous infusions, monitoring patients for adverse reactions.
- Assist patients in organizing their health care system activities.
- Assess the needs of patients' family members or caregivers.
- Collaborate with patients to plan for future health care needs or to coordinate transitions and referrals.
- Read current literature, talk with colleagues, and participate in professional organizations or conferences to keep abreast of developments in acute care.
- Participate in the development of practice protocols.
- Perform administrative duties that facilitate admission, transfer, or discharge of patients.
- Provide formal and informal education to other staff members.