 Hi guys, in today's video, I am going to talk about transitioning from med-surge to the ICU or intensive care unit. So I want to talk about the transition from med-surge to ICU because I had a year of med-surge experience and even though I had some experience as a nurse, when I went into ICU, I felt like a new grad nurse again. It was very overwhelming, which that is my number one piece of advice, is knowing that you're going to be overwhelmed when you go into the ICU. Whether you're going to ICU or actually anywhere as a new specialty, it's going to be overwhelming because it's a ton of information and it's just a very challenging field of nursing to be in. So knowing what I know now, I want to give you guys some things, some tips and things to kind of study before going into the ICU. So that way, at least you have a little bit of knowledge on it before getting exposed to it in a critical situation. Some important things to study before going into the ICU, one are your ventilator settings. Doing the difference between AC versus CMV versus SIMV versus PVRC versus APRV. If you don't know what any of those are and you're like, what the heck is she talking about? Go look them up. And also knowing not just what those settings are, but what type of patients we use them on, why we use them, what's PEEP, what's FIO2, what's IPAP, what's EPAP, what is your rate, what is your minute violation, how do those things correlate. Also knowing how they correlate with your ABGs. So if you get an ABG result with a high CO2, what's something you can do on your ventilator to correct that CO2 level. Another thing going along kind of with ventilators, but knowing your intubation drugs for when you're going to be intubating patients. As nurses, we push most of those meds with the exception of some and I'm not sure if there's any differences in different countries. So I'm just speaking for the U.S. But knowing the difference between propofol, fentanyl, automidate, succinylcholine, beck, rock, all these different things, why we use them. And also some contraindications to using some of them. Some of these meds you can't give to certain types of patients because maybe they've got issues with their kidneys or they have a high potassium. Things like that where these meds can cause life-threatening, other life-threatening issues. If you're intubating someone, obviously, you're probably intubating them for a life-threatening issue. So you don't want to cause any more of those. Another little side tip, this is something I told my nursing students this past week, is knowing, so if you have like 100 micrograms of fentanyl and that isn't a two mil syringe, if the doc says give 50 mils, knowing that you're only going to give one mil of that. So you've got to really kind of study up on those specific ones to your unit in hospital. I know they probably come in different concentrations depending on where you work, but knowing that there's 10 milligrams per cc of rock in a 10 mil syringe, knowing how much you're going to give if the doctor says give 50 milligrams. Another thing to really study up on are all of your drip medications because on most floors you're not doing a whole lot of cardiac drips, things like that. With the exception of like intermediate care unit and some telemetry units, we'll do like heparin drips, things like that. But I'm talking about when you've got a patient on levifed, vasopressin, neosinephrine, epinephrine, and you've got a bicarb drip, and they've got an insulin drip, and you're infusing potassium and magnesium and phosphorus. You've got all these things going in all at once. You've got to know which meds do what. So if your blood pressure is dropping or your heart rate all of a sudden is super high, what are you going to do to those different medications? So studying up on the ICU drips is super, super important. The last thing, a study tip is studying up on hemodynamics, knowing not just hemodynamics of what they are. Okay, you know what CVP is. That's great. You know what a normal range of CVP is. That's great. But knowing what are you going to do to increase and decrease CVP? When are you going to see a high CVP? What type of patient? What type of disease? How does your heart rate affect your cardiac output? How does your blood pressure affect your heart rate? All those things and how they tie into one another. If you understand hemodynamics and you understand the different medications and drips and how those affect the hemodynamics, you're going to be a lot more well-prepared, well-knowledge, well-versed nurse. I know that's probably information overload for a lot of you, but if you're heading into the ICU, it's going to be information overload, and the best thing you can do is always be constantly learning and looking things up and asking questions. There's going to be a lot more experienced nurses there that are going to be able to answer things for you. And over time, you're going to get the grasp of things and it's going to make a lot more sense. And it's actually quite fun and exciting when you can have a really sick patient and understand what's going on and what intervention you can anticipate or expect and be able to analyze, okay, well, why is my urine output decreasing? Why is my blood pressure decreasing? Why is my heart rate going up? And how all the pathophys and things at the cellular level that are going on the body is affecting your patient and their vital signs and the other things that you're seeing on the outward appearance, so to speak. So it's really exciting. It's really fun. And if you're choosing ICU, that is awesome. And yeah, I know that was a lot of information. So thank you guys for watching this video and I'll see you in my next video. Bye.