Icu Vs Floor Nurse

Dec 06 2001 icu nursing vs floor nursing.

Icu vs floor nurse.

Patient load an er nurse might see anywhere from 8 40 people on a single shift. When did you decide to change specialty and why. One critically ill patient can keep you running nonstop for hours. Joshua21 stated that if you put an icu nurse on the floor they would be like a duck out of water and vice versa.

It usually isn t a case of calling a doctor so much as walking up to one and asking for an order. However an icu nurse will typically only oversee 1 3 patients per shift if they don t have any transfers admissions. Because of the high number of patients on the med surg floor the nurse here must usually spend a larger amount of time than the icu nurse does in educating patients and family members and answering their questions. Icu nurses on the other hand typically operate like well oiled machines and wouldn t have it any other way.

Well at my hospital that is exactly what we do. Many floor nurses understand the intensity and stress of a code but that doesn t match the constant stress of the icu. Organization or lack thereof i have never met an icu nurse who wasn t meticulously organized and borderline ocd. Icu nurses are necessary for complex patient cases where a high level of assessment is needed.

The unit nurses float to all of the floors of the hospital and we are expected to take a fair share of our load. For instance doctors are almost always available on the unit. I d love to hear from some of the nurses that have done both. Every now and then i have a shift where my patients are stable and relatively easy but those are few and far between in my unit.

Floor nurses feel they have the toughest because they have more patients less monitors more visitors etc. I decided to switch to the icu about 18 months into working in the ed. The goal of the icu nurse is to give detailed continuous care to critically ill patients. I was a new graduate nurse in the emergency department ed for about two years before i switched to the micu medical intensive care unit in march 2016.

While the med surg nurse must juggle less acute concerns for multiple patients the icu nurse usually juggles far more serious issues for only one or two patients at a time. Icu nursing can be as hectic as floor nursing but in a different way. At first glance the two types of treatment can seem interchangeable. I much prefer the icu craziness over a floor.

Icu nurses feel they have the toughest job because the patient acuity is higher.