Should New Grad Nurses be Able to Work in the ICU?

Should New Grad Nurses be Able to Work in the ICU?

The healthcare field has been adding jobs like crazy for decades now and economic experts are not expecting the growth to slow down any time soon as the Baby Boomer generation grows older and more dependent on the healthcare system. Nurses are one position within the healthcare field that is growing especially fast; so fast that many hospitals are short on the number of nurses they would like to have on the payroll. Because of these staffing shortages, some hospitals are forced to staff ICUs with new nurses but this is generally an exception rather than the norm. Should new nurses be able to work in the ICU? Read on to find out why or why not.

An intensive care unit (ICU), aka critical care unit, is where patients who are in critical condition and need near-constant attention are located. There are many responsibilities of ICU nurses, such as bedside care, monitoring, and responding to changes in condition. The patient assignments per nurse are much lower in the ICU than in other areas of a hospital because of the increased time and attention each patient typically needs. As you will see shortly, the demands of being a nurse in the ICU typically require an experienced nurse.

Experienced nurses are better suited for bedside care because they will be more familiar with communicating complex medical situations to laypeople that typically have little to no interaction with a healthcare system. Experienced nurses also are more familiar with monitoring the multiple, complex conditions that are consistent with the types of patients being sent to the ICU. These nurses not only monitor the patient directly but many complex, highly-technical machines that also monitor patients or administer treatments.

Inevitably the time will come for nurses to switch from monitoring to intervening if a patient begins to experience a health emergency. You may be thinking, "well every nurse has to gain experience intervening or responding to health emergencies," and while that is right, it is generally advisable for new nurse graduates to begin building that experience in other hospital units first. Because of the heavy responsibilities of being in the ICU, many nurses agree that it is the most difficult and life-consuming job within a hospital. Most ICU units also require special training or certification(s) beyond nursing school that new graduates will not have as soon as they graduate. They will need to fulfill those requirements before being considered for most ICU units.

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