Audrey Decotis posted
In this discussion, briefly introduce yourself to your classmates and describe your professional setting, where you are (or have been) practicing, how many years, and the types of assessments conducted in your setting.
Classmate 1:
Audrey Decotis posted
Hi everyone,
My name is Audrey and I’m from Rhode Island. I work in Worcester Massachusetts at St. Vincent hospital and have been there for a year now. St. Vincent hospital was founded in 1893 by the Catholic Organization Sisters of Providence. SVH occupies 283 beds including heart and vascular services, orthopedics, rehabilitation programs, emergency services, and women & infant programs. On the telemetry/medical surgical floor that I work on we have all types of patients with various diagnoses requiring different assessments. When a patient is admitted to the floor we perform a head-to-toe assessment that gives us an overall understanding of the patient and their medical diagnosis. If a patient is admitted and has a pressure injury, then a skin assessment is performed. The Braden scale is used to determine the risk of a patient to develop skin injuries. For the geriatric patients on the floor we perform a Hendrich II Fall Risk assessment. This scale helps us determine the best way to keep the patients safe. if we determine the patient is at a great risk of falling we use bed alarms, tab alarms and side rails to help prevent falls. A couple other nursing assessments used are for patients that may be detoxing from alcohol or opiates. CIWA (Clinical Institute Withdrawal Assessment for Alcohol) scale is used for patients withdrawing from alcohol. By using this scale we can score the patient and see the best amount of medication to give the patient to help relieve withdrawal symptoms. The COWS (Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale) is used to help those withdrawing from opiates.
I look forward to this class and learning new assessments to help with patient care. I’m hoping to use what I learn in class in my daily assessments at work.
Classmate 2:
Candace Murphy posted
Hi Everyone,
My name is Candace. I have been a nurse for 12 Years. 3 of those years I worked on a med/surg tele unit in NY and the past 9 years I have worked in Interventional Radiology at a hospital in New Jersey. I work 5 days a week. I have 3 children 8,7, and 5 and my husband has currently been serving in the US Army for the past 18 years as a Black Hawk pilot. Needless to say I don’t know what sleep is and I’m always tired. As proud as I am of my husband and all of his accomplishments, receiving my BSN has been a personal accomplishment for myself. I feel like I will never get there, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. In Interventional Radiology patient assessment skills are crucial to the job. When receiving patients a full head to toe of a “baseline” assessment of the patients is imperative in care. This is important because we need to know post procedure if there has been any change in the patients condition. During the procedures there is constant assessment of the patient’s conditions. Patients can not only dicompensate from the procedure itself, but they can dicompensate from the sedation administered by the nurse. After the procedure the patients need to monitored and again constant assessment of the patient’s condition until the patient is considered to be at “baseline” and can be sent back to the unit we received them from. During the assessments Vital signs, breathing , coloring are all important. In my department we perform procedure such as lung biopsies. During these biopsies patients develop a pneumothorax. If the nurse is not constantly monitor or assessing the patient to make the doctor aware of any changes it could be fatal to the patient if not treated quickly enough.I look forward to working with everyone. I hope you all had a great holiday!
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