The Nursing Crash Cart

I love this profession, but not everything about it is puppies and rainbows. In this episode, I give you 10 reasons you may not want to pursue a career in an emergency department. Unless the reasons get you excited. Then you should totally do it!

This episode covers positive pressure ventilation – both invasive and non-invasive, discusses what reasons we may see that use positive pressure to help our patients, and some troubleshooting for ventilators. Patients who are short of breath will be a daily problem that you will encounter, and this gives you the low-down on the aggressive treatments!

After a way-too-long hiatus, I’m back! This episode discusses the state of the podcast, where it’s going in the future, and covering drugs used around rapid sequence intubation. Thank you to everyone who has sent me messages, I feel honored to be a small part of this community!

Today’s episode will guide you through the sea of headache patients in the Emergency Room. From a simple tension headache to a subarachnoid hemorrhage, this podcast will cover your important assessments, treatments, and supportive interventions. You can’t miss this episode if you want to know how to do a good neuro assessment in the ED! www.edcrashcart.com

In this episode I talk about why we need to care about sepsis, how we diagnose it, how we treat it, what it’s doing to our patients, and why EGDT (early goal directed therapy) is the best thing you can do to decrease mortality. As a bonus, learn about some receptor sites and hear a minor rant on rising above mediocrity.

This episode covers interpreting a blood gas, as well as goes more in depth on acid base (though not too in depth) and then applies the discussed topics to a patient in DKA, one of the most common metabolic disorders you will see in the ED. www.edcrashcart.com

Episode 03 – Chest Pain This episode discusses focused assessment, differential diagnosis, interventions, and evaluations for the heavy hitters of chest pain. Filled with more mnemonics than you can shake a stick at, this episode is the first of the chief complaint series, talking about how to approach the most common complaints seen in the ED.  www.edcrashcart.com

In this episode, I talk about what makes the ED different than other critical care and floor nursing environments, and talk about what roles and areas you can expect to see in an Emergency Department. After a few weeks of attempting to get my podcast feed submitted to iTunes, I changed wordpress plugins to PowerPress, deleted my old posts, reposted the poscasts, and iTunes accepted the feed. So, in a week or so, the podcast should be searchable on iTunes, and I’ll be sure and link the feed here, too.  Special thanks to Pretty Lights for the background music of today’s episode. As mentioned in the show, here’s the ESI algorithm:

Hello and welcome to the podcast! This is the first episode, where I discuss what this podcast will be covering, and some tips for your first days in the Emergency Department. Subscribe to the podcast to stay up to date with this project and receive all future episodes. Thanks, and safe nursing!