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Career Description

Provide advanced nursing care for patients with acute conditions such as heart attacks, respiratory distress syndrome, or shock. May care for pre- and post-operative patients or perform advanced, invasive diagnostic or therapeutic procedures.

What Job Titles Acute Care Nurses Might Have

• Clinical Nurse Educator
• Nurse Manager
• Nursing Director
• Staff Nurse

What Acute Care Nurses Do

• Perform emergency medical procedures, such as basic cardiac life support (BLS), advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), and other condition stabilizing interventions.
• Manage patients' pain relief and sedation by providing pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions, monitoring patients' responses, and changing care plans accordingly.
• Document data related to patients' care including assessment results, interventions, medications, patient responses, or treatment changes.
• Diagnose acute or chronic conditions that could result in rapid physiological deterioration or life-threatening instability.
• Administer blood and blood product transfusions or intravenous infusions, monitoring patients for adverse reactions.
• Assess urgent and emergent health conditions using both physiologically and technologically derived data.
• Assess the impact of illnesses or injuries on patients' health, function, growth, development, nutrition, sleep, rest, quality of life, or family, social and educational relationships.
• Interpret information obtained from electrocardiograms (EKGs) or radiographs (x-rays).
• Obtain specimens or samples for laboratory work.
• Collaborate with patients to plan for future health care needs or to coordinate transitions and referrals.
• Refer patients for specialty consultations or treatments.
• Set up, operate, or monitor invasive equipment and devices such as colostomy or tracheotomy equipment, mechanical ventilators, catheters, gastrointestinal tubes, and central lines.
• Discuss illnesses and treatments with patients and family members.
• Distinguish between normal and abnormal developmental and age-related physiological and behavioral changes in acute, critical, and chronic illness.
• Collaborate with members of multidisciplinary health care teams to plan, manage, or assess patient treatments.
• Assess the needs of patients' family members or caregivers.
• Perform administrative duties that facilitate admission, transfer, or discharge of patients.
• Provide formal and informal education to other staff members.
• Read current literature, talk with colleagues, and participate in professional organizations or conferences to keep abreast of developments in acute care.
• Treat wounds or superficial lacerations.
• Participate in patients' care meetings and conferences.
• Participate in the development of practice protocols.
• Adjust settings on patients' assistive devices such as temporary pacemakers.
• Prescribe medications and observe patients' reactions, modifying prescriptions as needed.
• Order, perform, or interpret the results of diagnostic tests and screening procedures based on assessment results, differential diagnoses, and knowledge about age, gender and health status of clients.
• Analyze the indications, contraindications, risk complications, and cost-benefit tradeoffs of therapeutic interventions.
• Assist patients in organizing their health care system activities.

What Acute Care Nurses Should Be Good At

• Oral Comprehension - The ability to listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
• Problem Sensitivity - The ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem.
• Written Comprehension - The ability to read and understand information and ideas presented in writing.
• Oral Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
• Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
• Inductive Reasoning - The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).
• Information Ordering - The ability to arrange things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules (e.g., patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations).
• Speech Clarity - The ability to speak clearly so others can understand you.
• Near Vision - The ability to see details at close range (within a few feet of the observer).
• Speech Recognition - The ability to identify and understand the speech of another person.
• Written Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand.

What Acute Care Nurses Should Be Interested In

• Investigative - Investigative occupations frequently involve working with ideas, and require an extensive amount of thinking. These occupations can involve searching for facts and figuring out problems mentally.
• Realistic - Realistic occupations frequently involve work activities that include practical, hands-on problems and solutions. They often deal with plants, animals, and real-world materials like wood, tools, and machinery. Many of the occupations require working outside, and do not involve a lot of paperwork or working closely with others.

What Acute Care Nurses Need to Learn

• Medicine and Dentistry - Knowledge of the information and techniques needed to diagnose and treat human injuries, diseases, and deformities. This includes symptoms, treatment alternatives, drug properties and interactions, and preventive health-care measures.
• Customer and Personal Service - Knowledge of principles and processes for providing customer and personal services. This includes customer needs assessment, meeting quality standards for services, and evaluation of customer satisfaction.
• English Language - Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
• Education and Training - Knowledge of principles and methods for curriculum and training design, teaching and instruction for individuals and groups, and the measurement of training effects.
• Psychology - Knowledge of human behavior and performance; individual differences in ability, personality, and interests; learning and motivation; psychological research methods; and the assessment and treatment of behavioral and affective disorders.
• Therapy and Counseling - Knowledge of principles, methods, and procedures for diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of physical and mental dysfunctions, and for career counseling and guidance.
• Mathematics - Knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, statistics, and their applications.
• Biology - Knowledge of plant and animal organisms, their tissues, cells, functions, interdependencies, and interactions with each other and the environment.
• Sociology and Anthropology - Knowledge of group behavior and dynamics, societal trends and influences, human migrations, ethnicity, cultures and their history and origins.