Shadowing The Nurse Reflection

I was very happy I received the opportunity to observe down in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and shadow the nurse Stacy. I am interested in pediatric nursing, and although I was a patient in the PICU at one time in my life, I did not get to see or learn a whole lot about it. I was surprised to find out the nurse I was shadowing had her Associates Degree in Nursing along with some of the other nurses on the unit. For some reason, I just figured the nurses would all have their Bachelors of Science in Nursing. Stacy informed me that the nurses can have their Associates Degree in Nursing (AND), Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN), or a BSN with the certification of a Critical Care Registered Nurse (CCRN). She told me that along …show more content…
Essential responsibilities for this job include taking the vital signs and doing physical assessments, and then, recording the data onto a paper flow sheet that is in the patient’s room at all times. They do it this way so when the doctors, attendings, and residents are making their rounds all the vital information they need is right there in the room with them, and they do not have to search through the computer system for it. There is an exception though. If the patient is a cardiac patient or was a cardiac patient in the past, Stacy said it is charted into the computer like it is done on my assigned unit in the hospital. Nurses on this unit also do more frequent rounding on their patients due to the fact that they are sicker and need more attention to ensure all of their needs are being met. The job responsibilities differ from the essential responsibilities of nurses on my assigned clinical unit in a few ways. The patients on this unit get rounded on more frequently and a lot of them have machines such as ventilators that nurses on my assigned unit do not use. Nurses in the PICU also do extubation, wound dressings, suctioning, and many of them have to ensure their patients are kept sedated. Patients on that unit are very critical, and the nurse is assigned to fewer …show more content…
I spent a lot of time with a one-year-old patient who was beaten very badly when he was just six weeks old. So after hearing the in depth story, it was amazing to see him so happy and smiling and giggling after everything he had been through and is still dealing with. It is never fun to see children sick. I would have to say what I liked least about this experience was seeing young children intubated and hooked up to all of the lines and tubes. Even though not all patients are like this, it is interesting to see how happy some kids are despite how sick they