Intensive Care Unit and
Surgical Step Down Unit
May 2014
Intensive Care Unit and
Surgical Step Down Unit
,
RNs and more
ICU/SSDU
Fox Chase Cancer Center
Philadelphia
,
PA
United States

 

 

 

Imagine this: You are a critical care nurse and your patient is "going bad" once again. You are exhausted from working day after day in an environment of patient crisis after crisis. Then you hear the operator say "Code Blue" again! Your feet hurt, your back hurts, yet you have to find the strength and energy to run to the outpatient department for the third time this week. You picture what you are leaving behind you as you run. You are leaving behind your hard-working coworkers, nurses who are also trying hard to get their patients back on the road to recovery. Now, this happens! You question yourself in your head, "How are we ever going to manage?" But, you do manage. All of you manage it. Somehow you keep the patients safe and you get them better. You are a team. No matter how short staffed the ICU has been, they are a team. The ICU has been managing without a few full time employees (FTEs) since the summer and they have had a decrease in their pool nurses' availability. The Step-down nurses have been pulled into the unit. Despite their anxiety over getting pulled, they really stepped up to the plate and were able to effectively care for those critically ill patients. The ICU staff certainly stepped up to the plate, too. They switched their assignments around multiple times during the course of 24 hours so that the step-down nurses could have the less critical patients. The ICU nurses acted as a resource to the step-down nurses all while they were caring for some seriously critically ill patients these past few months. The team of ICU Nurses and Step-Down Nurses truly deserves the DAISY Team Award. Their hard work - extra hard work - should be celebrated. They deserve recognition for keeping our sickest patients in good hands. They never gave up, they are still not giving up even though they remain short staffed at times. Their teamwork has been an inspiration to us all. These extraordinary caregivers have been honored with the DAISY Team Award: (to be filled in)