About This Role
This night-shift post on the cardiac ward pairs patient care with mentoring new nurses.
Responsibilities
- Communicate procedures and treatments with patient and significant others to gain cooperation, understanding, and trust and allay apprehension while reaching mutual consent in care approach
- Communicate patient education based on individualized needs of the patient, as requested by Physician and/or facility policy to optimize the patients preparation for surgery and continued care upon discharge
- Direct care of the patient in accordance with physician orders, including astute assessment of patient responses to medical treatment, therapeutic response to prescribed medications, ability to recognize significant conditions and adverse reactions, and effectively communicate patient's condition, progress, and reaction to drugs, treatments, and or significant change in condition with physician, peers & family
- Obtain concurrent vital signs to detect deviations from expected normal values and assess condition for changing patient status and independently intervene with appropriate care
- Plan and deliver direct patient care based upon evidence based practices, facility policies, procedures, protocols or processes
- Maintain awareness of specific needs of patient including but not limited to: comfort; pain relief; anxiety relief; cultural and spiritual diversity; age specificity; verify correct patient, procedure, side/site; protection of tissue and nerve damage by proper body positioning while under anesthesia; apply aseptic techniques for prevention of surgical site infection; hydration; thermoregulation; hemodynamics; accurate management of specimens; prevention of retained foreign objects, and burn and fire prevention and plan direct care interventions accordingly
- Verify patient identification; patients understanding of planned procedure by cross reference to informed consent; correct procedure site, side, & supplies; allergies and other special needs before proceeding with planned procedure
- Apply experiential knowledge for making decisions specific to efficiencies and cost containment to optimize work flow and protection of business assets
- Accurately communicate continuum of direct patient care verbally and in writing within the medical record
- Acknowledge medical and surgical history obtained from H&P, known allergies and physical condition by visualization
- Conduct assessment and re-assessments before and following treatments, medications administered, and patient condition at time of transfer of care
- Prepare operating / procedure rooms with specific equipment, sterile instruments and supplies based on physician preferences and the accumulative knowledge based on experiences to optimize patient safety, work flow, efficiencies and cost containment strategies
- Consistently perform hand hygiene practices for the prevention of infection