What I love most about being a nurse is that I go home feeling great about what I’ve done. To me it’s not just about holding hands or wearing colorful scrubs. It’s about using fast critical thinking skills, listening to your gut, your instinct, and going from there.
My inspiration
I just knew that nurses are frontline healthcare providers, and I wanted to do something that would provide direct patient care.
The skills of a Pediatric and Neonatal Critical Care Transport Nurse
Hear what Anita, MSN, RN, CCRN, C-NPT, has to say about being a Pediatric and Neonatal Critical Care Transport Nurse.
I serve as a Pediatric and Neonatal Critical Care Transport Nurse.
My responsibilities
I triage calls and take decisions within a rapidly changing environment and provide expert clinician support to the referring facilities. We mobilize as a team as fast as possible to retrieve a patient to provide optimum care. So, most of my job is fast paced, requires very fast critical thinking skills, function autonomously while working with many different teams, while maintaining a professional and courteous conduct.
You come into work early. You have to be there on time. And then you get the shift report from the previous nurse that was taking care of the patient. And you get a full, head-to-toe, their entire history, everything. And then you go check on your patients.
You introduce yourself. You do an initial assessment. See how they are. You check all the medications that they need to be taking, what time, all the side effects, the adverse reactions. Make sure everything is compatible. And then soon after that you round with the interdisciplinary team; with the doctors, the physical therapist, the occupational therapist, make sure that you have a plan for this patient.
My innovation story
There was this one night shift where she wiggled her index finger, and I wasn’t sure if I saw it or if I was imagining it. Eventually she was blinking, she was turning her head, she was recovering,
That was something that I can't forget because just being there, day and night at her bedside. I was the first one to catch that initial sort of improvement in her clinical status.
If your orientation isn’t enough, speak to the manager, or your preceptor, and ask them for more time.”
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Executive Producer -
RNCCRN-KMSNCPNCNLManager of Clinical Quality and Care Management, Visiting Nurse and Hospice for New Hampshire and Vermont (VNH), Dartmouth Hitchcock Health -
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RNMSBSNInsights Research Associate, Cambridge Design Partnership, and Staff Nurse II, WakeMed Cary ICU