Case Study: CCRN?
Jaime was hesitant about taking the CCRN exam. She was a 15-year veteran of the ICU whose expertise was counted on in orienting new staff and precepting students.
Nursing Care of COVID Patients
In a quote from a nurse on the frontlines of the COVID crisis, “I have witnessed innumerable deaths in my career. But I’ve never watched this many, relatively young, otherwise healthy people become this sick, this quickly and die alone. As of today, the CDC reports 12 million cases and 257,000 deaths from COVID-19. Every …
Free Radicals
Let’s talk about free radicals. What causes free radicals to be produced in the body? Several different things. Cells that have decreased perfusion produce free radicals. This is what happens with myocardial infarction or stroke, or sepsis, or any form of shock. It is the result of the inflammatory process. Free radicals are produced by …
Family Involvement in ICU Delirium Detection
Delirium in the ICU is associated with increased hospital length of stay with cognitive impairment, and even with death. Delirium may go undetected in many of our hospitalized patients or be assumed to be part of the ordinary course of the disease. However, in this study, they found that family administered delirium detection has high …
VTE in COVID Infection
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Not a Good Test-Taker?
Not good at test-taking? Change that. Many self-proclaimed poor test-takers are really poor-studiers instead. Exams serve as a method of assessment of learning. If learning has not happened at a level at which you can apply what you learned, then you will have trouble applying learning to exam questions. The key is to focus on …
6 Easy Steps to ABG Interpretation
Easy. Accurate. Fast. There are 6 Easy Steps for interpreting arterial blood gases correctly.
Form a Virtual Study Group
Do you know some people from your institution who are also studying for certification exams? Ask them to join in a Virtual Study Group. Students often tell me that they cannot form a study group because their friends work different shifts or live in different directions. One way to resolve the dilemma is to join …
Review Your Answer Choices
Once you have completed the exam, go back over your answers to make sure you answered all the questions. The exam software should alert you to unanswered questions. If you have no idea what the question is asking, answer anyway. Even if flipping a coin, you will have a 25% chance of being correct. After …
How to Study for Certification When You’re Busy
No one has free time to study for certification. If there is extra time in your day, someone will fill it for you if you have no free time but have certification as a goal you will need to find opportunities to study. Fortunately for you, studying in small short chunks is more effective than …
Watch Out for Similar Terms
Nursing uses prefixes hyper and hypo frequently when referring to blood pressure, electrolytes, and even bowel sounds. The problem is that hyper and hypo sound alike, especially when connected to a suffix. For our purposes, hyper and hypo also read-alike, making discerning the two difficult. Add in the stress of an exam, and you could …
Certification Tips: Analyzing the Stem
Test-takers may think they know what the question is asking before reading it and skip right to the answer they think is correct. This can be a mistake because the author may have written the question to trick those who are not careful. Certification exams include such items to be sure you are thorough in …