Nurses: At the frontline of ER care
Of the more than 60,000 visits to Children's Memorial's emergency room each year for fevers, earaches, ingested objects, broken bones, and many other serious illnesses and injuries, nurses are often the first people families and patients meet. "It's our job to sort everything out," says ER nurse Claudia Kirschner. "It's a frontline responsibility."
The emergency room is the only place in the hospital where patients arrive for care around the clock. It never closes and no one is ever turned away. Triage, the task of evaluating the severity of illness or injury and determining who needs to be seen next, is unique to the ER. Nurses play a critical role tending to the physical and emotional needs of patients and families and managing the flow of traffic in this fast-paced environment. "We would be lost without our outstanding nurses," says Steven Krug, head of the division of emergency medicine.
Experience counts
Children's Memorial's ER nurses are some of the most experienced and highly trained according to director Cathleen Shanahan. "I don't know many hospitals or departments where the average experience is ten years," she says. ER nursing calls upon a broad range of skills that are put to the test each shift. It requires astute clinical expertise to evaluate and prioritize patients who present with similar symptoms or to retrieve information from families about unexplained illnesses. "We have to pick up on subtle clues from the child and parent to find out what's going on," says Kirschner.
ER nurses are responsible not only for making important clinical decisions and beginning treatment, but for helping families through the crisis that brought them to the ER in the first place. "Nurses set the tone for the ER visit and for the rest of the hospital," says Kirschner. Children's Memorial nurses recently won the accolades of two national health care organizations. The American Nurses Credentialing Center granted its prestigious Magnet Award, and the Health Care Advisory Board designated Children's Memorial a "Destination Nursing" site.