Critical Care Nursing: Skills, Challenges, and Ethical Dilemmas

This essay delves into the multifaceted role of critical care nurses, emphasizing their critical function in managing life-threatening conditions and providing expert care within intensive care units and broader healthcare settings. It highlights the necessity for specialized skills such as communication, critical thinking, and clinical proficiency to effectively address the complex needs of vulnerable patients. The essay also addresses the various challenges faced by these nurses, including demanding workloads, ethical dilemmas, and the potential for emotional exhaustion. It further underscores the importance of a supportive work environment that enables nurses to function effectively in diverse roles, from patient care and consultation to research and education. The content is available on Desklib, a platform offering a wide range of study tools and resources for students.

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Role of critical care nurses
The concept of critical care nurses can be described as a critical care nursing as which speciality can deal with the human responses towards the life-threatening issues. In this, the critical
care nurses for the patients with having an acute as well as volatile physiologic issues as well as their care givers. It can include accessing the life-threatening conditions, initiating an
effective intervention, evaluating the results of the effective interventions as well as giving appropriate education and the emotional empowerment to the service users. It is known that the
critical care nurses can furnish an expert, specialist care to the critically injured or ill service users in the intensive care units as well as the broader healthcare organizations as well. In this,
the care nurses are generally greatly trained as well as skilled safety-critical professionals working as a part of the multidisciplinary care team.
The critical care is mainly classified by simply using four levels of the vulnerable patient acuteness. In addition to this, the step competency framework generally underpins the critical care
nurse education, it recognises that to be able to foster the high-quality care to the vulnerable patients, the staff can require the skills as well as the knowledge’s so that they can work at the
greatest level with having standardization across all the critical care units. In the nursing care, the step one mainly begins when a care nurse having no prior experience of the speciality starts
working in an intensive care medicine. In this, there are some of the effective skills that a critical care nurse can need to perform their duties such as having skilful communication, the
interpersonal skills, issues-resolving skills, critical thinking skills, decision-making skills, having assessment skills, clinical care skills and many more. These all skills are quite essential for
a care nurse to effectively provide an intensive care to the vulnerable patients.
It is also identified that the critical care nurses can also face multiple challenges or difficulties while providing care. It can involve working in an unfamiliar surrounding
environment, having lack of effective experience in providing care to the vulnerable patients, involving anxiety about being contaminated, heavy workload. In addition to this, having
extreme exhaustion and depression as well due to failure in furnishing care treatment to ill patients. Furthermore, the critical care nurses can also face ethical dilemmas associated with the
care of the vulnerable patients. In this, the moral distress on perceived problems of delivering the futile or a non-beneficial care that can lead to an emotional exhaustion or burnout.
Consequently, it is essential that all the members of the well-being care team can co-exist within a healthy work environment. Moreover, the critical care nurses can function in multiple roles
such as a patient, consultants, staff educators, the administrators, researchers and the expert healthcare professionals as well. Having an advanced care practice critical care nurses who is a
clinical nurse specialist can typically function in more than one of these such roles.