Critical care nurses provide care to seriously ill patients. Most critical care nurses work in such hospital settings as intensive care units, cardiac care units, cardiac catheter labs, emergency departments and recovery rooms. Increasingly, critical care nurses work in home healthcare and managed care organizations.
Description
Critical care nurses practice in settings where patients require complex assessment, high-intensity therapies and interventions, and continuous nursing vigilance.
The responsibilities of a critical care nurses may include:
- Work directly with critically ill patients
- Perform frequent patient evaluations, including monitoring and tracking patient status
- Assess patients’ conditions and determine when consultation is required
- Perform procedures such as IV placement and phlebotomy
- Help to perform diagnostic tests and analyze results
- Operate medical equipment
- Administer treatment and medications
- Develop and implement day-to-day nursing care plans
Personal qualifications
- Excellent judgment, dependability, conscientious performance
- Close attention to detail, scrupulous recordkeeping
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
- High ethical standards, integrity
- Dependability
- Ability to work cooperatively with others
- The capacity to react to emergencies in a calm and reasoned manner
- Commitment to patient’s welfare
- Caring and sympathetic
- Emotional stability to cope with human suffering, emergencies, and other stresses
- Physical strength and stamina
Licensing
In all states and the District of Columbia, students must graduate from an approved nursing program and pass a national licensing examination, known as the NCLEX-RN, in order to obtain a nursing license. Nurses may be licensed in more than one state, either by examination or by the endorsement of a license issued by another state.
Although certification is not mandatory for practice in a specialty like critical care, many nurses choose to become certified.
Employment opportunities
- Excellent, ranking among the fastest growing occupations according to the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Employment of critical care nurses is expected to grow much faster than average (Increase 27 percent or more) through the year 2014
- Nurses who have graduated from a BSN program have better job prospects than RNs who have not earned a baccalaureate degree
Salary
Median annual earnings of nurses in general medical and surgical hospital settings: $53,450 (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, May 2005)
Progression
Critical care nurses may specialize in treatment of patients with particular health problems, such as cardiac and vascular or respiratory care.
With experience and good performance, critical care nurses may be promoted to assistant head nurse or head nurse and, from there, to assistant director, director, and vice president. Increasingly, advanced practice in critical care or management-level nursing positions require a graduate or an advanced degree in nursing or health services administration. They also require leadership, negotiation skills, and good judgment.
Getting there: Your degree programs at MCPHS
- BS Nursing - 32-month Accelerated Program (Boston): full-time, accelerated 32-month program for incoming freshmen or transfer students who do not have a prior baccalaureate degree who wish to become registered nurses
- BS Nursing - 16-month Postbaccalaureate Program (Worcester and Manchester): full-time, accelerated 16-month program for applicants who have met all preprofessional course requirements and who hold a previously earned bachelor’s degree and wish to become registered nurses (Manchester campus program launch: 2007)