Staff Nurse PICU

• Job Summary
  • • The Staff Nurse is a professional nurse who, with minimal supervision, assesses, plans, implements, and evaluates nursing care for patients/families on assigned units.
• Education
  • • Graduate of an accredited school of nursing. 
• Experience
• Licensures, Certifications, and/or Registries
  • • Current RN license in the State of Alabama.

    • Current BLS certification.

Additional Information

The Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) is a 24-bed unit, located on 7th floor quarterback in the Russell Building. The PICU has 24/7 Pediatric Intensivist coverage, as well as Pediatric ICU Fellows and Acute Care Pediatric Nurse Practitioners. PICU also has 2nd-year residents who do rotations throughout the year. The collaboration between the disciplines is excellent. Patient-Family Centered Rounds are done 2-3 times daily with participation from family and staff.  There is a multi-disciplinary team of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, nutritionists, chaplains, respiratory therapists, social workers, physical therapists and child life therapists that are included in rounds.

The PICU patient population is very diverse. About 60 % of the patients are medical patients and about 40% are surgical.  Of the surgical patients, half are trauma patients.  We care for children with a wide variety of diagnoses including but not limited to: respiratory failure, renal failure, shock, status epilepticus, status asthmatics, GI bleeding, and burns.  We also care for patients requiring ECMO and CRRT, and post-Liver or Kidney transplant patients.   We care for patients ranging from days old up to 21+ (chronic patients still under the care of their pediatric subspecialists). The average patient length of stay is between 3-4 days.  

Our normal nurse to patient ratio is 1:1 or 1:2 and sometimes in extremely critical patients 2:1 (such as ECMO, or patients requiring massive transfusion resuscitation). Our Charge Nurse does not take a patient load and manages the day to day operation and patient flow in the unit. Depending on census/acuity there will be 1 to 2 Resource PICU nurses who float around the unit assisting with procedures, admissions, transfers, and codes.  PICU physicians and nurses also respond to Codes throughout the hospital, and act as back-ups for the rapid response team.