Joining a critical care unit: ten tips to start

Abstract

Whether you're just out of school or have experience in other departments, starting out in intensive care is an adventure. Even for the most experienced, it requires a period of adaptation and professionalization. For some, it's a roller-coaster ride, while for others it's a time of soul-searching. The aim of this article is to offer ten tips to help you build your professional identity as an intensive care nurse. These tips are diverse and varied to represent the breadth of skills required to practice in intensive care: communicating effectively, building solid, high-performance clinical reasoning, demonstrating reflexivity and so on. To this end, more than just advice, practical tools are offered to help build the various skills.  It takes between 6 months and 1 year to become a competent intensive care nurse, managing 2 to 3 patients independently and focusing on effective, relevant clinical reasoning. This professionalization process requires a reality choc before building a solid professional identity. This professionalization is the responsibility of the nurse who has just started in intensive care, but it also should be the commun objective of the multi-professional team.