med surg 2024-2025
med surg 2024-2025
For new nurses, medical-surgical nursing, or med/surg, is frequently referred to as a starting point. This is not standard and will not be the case for all nurses, including myself. Because, well, you won’t really specialize in anything, medical/surgical is a great specialty to start your nursing career in. Med/surg nurses treat a wide range of patients and see a wide range of diseases. It’s a great place to find out what you like and doesn’t like about being a nurse, and it gives you the opportunity to improve your assessment and hands-on skills. However, medical and surgical nursing is difficult and requires self-assurance under pressure. A brief but honest look at the demanding work of a medical/surgical nurse can be found here.
Med/Surg Nursing Requires Strategic Time Management
Strategic time management is required in medical/surgical nursing, which has the highest patient-to-nurse ratios in an acute care setting. It is not uncommon for a nurse to handle seven patients at once. To put it mildly, it is challenging to care for seven patients. Because of this, nurses in medicine and surgery need to be good at managing their time and setting priorities. These abilities are acquired through experience and time. As soon as they step onto the floor, nurses must begin prioritizing. Each nurse will devise a method that suits them best. To stay organized, I highly recommend using brain sheets. You can print these from the internet, or you can make your own with the information you think is most important. Throughout your shift, you fill in and update your brain sheet to ensure that you don’t forget any details or tasks. Additionally, these notes assist with reporting to the subsequent nurse.
Med/surg Nurses See It All
- Patients ages 18 to 108 will be cared for by medical and surgical nurses. Pneumonia, dehydration, and diabetes are among the most common and unappealing diagnoses you’ll encounter on a daily basis; however, you’ll also be handling wounds, bowel obstructions, and patients who have recently undergone surgery. The best part, in my opinion, is that you will put all of the skills you learned in nursing school to use. You will, to name a few, insert IVs, change PICC line dressings, feed patients through tubes, and insert urinary catheters.
Med/surg Nurses Do It All
- Unfortunately, it’s not all fun to poke people or look at their deep wounds. In addition to providing nursing-specific care, you also serve as the housekeeper, pharmacist, physical therapist, dietician, and nursing assistant. This means that you are responsible for more than just nursing. You will administer medications throughout the day, examine lab results (and possibly draw them yourself if there isn’t a lab team), assist your patients in safely ambulating, take them to the bathroom or clean up after episodes of incontinence, assist them in bathing, provide snacks and drinks, feed them, and clean up their rooms. Every day, the tasks change so much that once I even had to unclog my patient’s toilet!
- Another reason why time management is so important is because of this. Most of the time, your planned shift will go wrong. In addition to being able to manage incoming orders, delegate, respond to the constant ringing of your phone, collaborate with other disciplines, and find any spare time to chart, you must be able to adapt to the patients’ ever-evolving conditions and requirements.
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