Critical Care Nurse

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Critical Care Nursing Critical care nursing is a specialty within nursing that deals specifically with human responses to life-threatening problems. A critical care nurse is a licensed professional nurse who is responsible for ensuring that acutely and critically ill patients receive optimal care. There have always been very ill and severely injured patients but the concept of critical care is fairly modern. There have been advances in both medicine and technology, thus causing patient care to become more complex. To ensure appropriate care, nurses needed to have specific knowledge and skills to support the patients' needs for continuous monitoring and treatment for illnesses. The first intensive care units came out in the 1950s to provide care to very ill…show more content…
A critical care nurse is responsible for being a patient advocate, as is every nurse. They must monitor the quality of care the patient receives. Critical care nurses work in a wide variety of settings, including bedside clinicians, nurse educators, nurse researchers, nurse managers, clinical nurse specialists and nurse practitioners. With the advances in technology critical care nurses are caring for patients who are more ill than ever before. A patient that needed to be hospitalized 20 years ago can be at home now receiving care. According to "The Registered Nurse Population" study, 56.2% of all nurses work in a hospital setting. Whether that be intensive care units (ICUs), pediatric ICUs, neonatal ICUs, cardiac units, telemetry units, or emergency departments. More recently critical care nurses are working in home health care along with nursing schools and outpatient surgery centers and clinics. There are approximately 500,000 nurses in the U.S. who care for critically ill patients in a hospital setting. Of those, around 225,000 spend at least half their time working in an

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