Emergencies & Crises
There comes a time in every nurse’s career that a crisis will emerge. In the critical care setting, emergencies and crises can be common. I often like to say the ICU is the last stop before death for a lot of the patient population that find themselves there. Instead of fearing this moment, how can we prepare for an emergency and/or a crisis? How can we better manage it?
There are a few different types of crises:
Ongoing Crisis: A Non-emergent situation where the patient is more or less stable but still requires vigilance and attentiveness in order to prevent an unstable crisis or an emergency.
Emergent: what we think of as a code.
Unstable Crisis: A situation where the patient is highly unstable and requires rapid and instantaneous interventions or else the situation will deteriorate into a life-threatening context.
Here we define a crisis not by how sick the patient is, but how the situation orients a nurse’s thinking, judgment and priorities.  Additionally, a crisis might be only momentary, or it could last hours or days. It all depends on the context.
The underlying characteristic of all crises is that a nurse must ACT. What varies in each crisis is how, when, what and why the nurse does what he/she does. In an ongoing crisis, you have a little more time to do what needs to get done. But in an unstable crisis, often times the nurse must do multiple interventions at the same time to prevent further deterioration.
Here you will find information on:
How to manage a crisis and emergent situations
How to manage life-sustaining functions in unstable patients
How to manage vital but non-emergent physiologic fluctuations
Coordinating multiple Instantaneous therapies
How to THINK while in a crisis
Ready? Set. Go: