Critical Care / Intensive Care (ICU) Nursing

Nurses who work in critical care units are responsible for providing care to patients who are experiencing or are at-risk for experiencing life-threatening conditions. Patients typically cared for in a critical care unit include patients that have had major invasive surgery, accident and trauma patients, or patients with multiple organ failure.

Nurses who work in critical care must assess and monitor the patient closely in order to identify subtle changes in a patient’s condition that warrant immediate intervention. Patients who are admitted to critical care tend to be medically unstable, requiring constant cardiac and respiratory monitoring and continual adjustment of treatments, such as the titration and dosing of multiple intravenous medications and changes in ventilatory support. Critical care nurses must be able to interpret, integrate and respond to a wide array of clinical information. Because of the critical nature of patients’ conditions, nurses working in critical care are often confronted with dealing with end-of-life issues and sometimes other ethical dilemmas related to withholding, withdrawing or medical futile care.

Some patients are unable to make decisions about their care in the unit because of the nature of their illness. An important role of the critical care nurse is to ensure that the patient and/or family are well informed about the care that that patient is receiving, that the patient and family receive the necessary information to make informed and highly personal decisions about the patient’s care, and that the patient and family’s decisions are respected in the development of any treatment plan for the patient.

Patients who respond well to treatment regimes are usually transferred out of the critical care unit to a stepdown, telemetry or medical-surgical unit for further recovery before being released from the hospital.

Many nurses choose to work on a medical-surgical unit when they begin their careers but have a strong desire to move to critical care after gaining initial experience. In other cases, new graduates want to work in critical care immediately upon graduation, and some hospitals offer internships in critical care for the new nursing graduate. Regardless of whether you start your career as a new nurse in critical care or decide to work in critical care after spending some time on a medical-surgical unit, additional education and training to care for the critically ill patient is required. In most instances, the employer makes arrangements for the nurse to obtain that additional education and training.

There are opportunities for registered nurses with an interest in critical care nursing to obtain master’s degrees as a clinical nurse specialist or nurse practitioner. Depending on the size of an organization and volumes of patients, there may be opportunities to work in a specialized critical care unit such as one devoted to caring for open heart surgical patients, medical cardiac patients, trauma patients, or neurosurgical/neurological patients.

Source :

http://www.futuresinnursing.org/planning/spotlight/critical.shtml