Leadership fun!

I have been telling people about my leadership rotation all week so this post should be pretty easy :) I started my leadership rotation on Monday last week, then went Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Leadership means that instead of doing clinical in a group, you do clinical all by yourself and you have a "preceptor" which is a nurse that you work with everyday. You work around her schedule, and she is solely responsible/in charge of you. The goal of the rotation is that by the end of 6 weeks, you should be doing about 90% of your nurse's job all by yourself. My nurse has an AWESOME schedule. She works Monday-Friday from 8-5 (or some really close variation of that, i.e sometimes it's 730-430). This is great because of a few reasons: a) I don't have to get up at the legitimate crack of dawn like I have for other clinicals that I had to be at by 630 b)I have no problem getting all of my hours in c)I can get all of my hours done in 5 weeks. So basically it's a really good deal for me. Everyone is fairly jealous of my schedule. And I'm okay with that.

So what am I doing for my leadership you ask? I am at Helen Devos Children's Hospital (by far the coolest hospital in Grand Rapids and essentially my dream place to work once I graduate). I am working in the Pediatric Sedation Unit. So basically what we do is sedate kids for an procedure that would be be painful or that requires the kids to lay perfectly still. They do a lot of lumbar punctures, bone marrow aspirates, biopsies, scopes (egd's and colonoscopies), castings, MRI's and other scans, central line insertions and port insertions and removals. I've gotten to see a TON of really awesome things. The role of the nurse in all of this is to very similar to the role of the OR nurse, except they do much more teaching and assessment than an OR nurse. The patient comes down to the room and meets the nurse there. She then tells them all about the procedure and teaches them about the medications we will be using, how fast it will put the child to sleep, how long the procedure will take and what to except after. She then gets the child all prepped and hooked up to the heart monitor, gets a pulse ox on and lets them pick a bandaid for after we take their IV out. Then she starts the IV (I can't do this because students aren't allowed to do IV's in pediatrics. At all. Ever). I do however get all the supplies out to start the IV, help the nurse start it, then as soon as its actually in the vein I do everything else. So I guess it's okay that I can't actually start them. So then during the procedure the nurse records vitals every 3 minutes and monitors the patient, and helps the doctors with anything they need. Right after the procedure the nurse is the one that stays with the patient as they wake up, takes all the leads and tape off, removes the IV and then talks to the family about what to expect for the rest of the day. She also gives all of the discharge instructions. So the nurse is DEFINITELY very busy during procedures. She also gets and draws up all of the medications, that's sort of a crucial thing I forgot. The medication we use to sedate is called Propofol and it puts kids to sleep in about 15 seconds, which is actually pretty funny to watch sometimes. It is jokingly called "Milk of Amnesia" because it has an amnesiac effect and after you come out of it you have no memory of the procedure. Fun Fact: It is also what Michael Jackson used to "sleep" and what killed him. When I Google-Imaged it I found mostly pictures of MJ, including a whole series of really hilarious by insensitive shirts that say "GOT PROPOFOL?"

So this week I started doing all of the vitals, getting the patient hooked up to the monitors, and doing discharge instructions. Next week I will add drawing up meds to the list, as well as all of the teaching at the beginning of the procedure. By the end of next week I'm hoping to be doing at least 50-75% of what my nurse does, with her supervision of course. I really like the unit that I'm in. We get to travel all over the hospital to do procedures sometimes, and I get to see so many different things and work with doctors, PA's, NP's and lots of other people. It's very cool and I'm very happy with it so far :) Next week I am going on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday then heading home for a long Memorial Day weekend!

76 days to go.