NUR 4020 - Complex High Acuity Health Challenges

3 lecture hours 6 lab hours 5 credits

• Provide safe, effective, compassionate team-based care that incorporates best practice standards to prioritize and respond to the fluctuating health conditions experienced by physiologically unstable clients across the lifespan (Person-Centered Care)
• Integrate pharmacological principles into the management of physiologically unstable clients (Person-Centered Care)
• Demonstrate clinical reasoning skills in analyzing the interrelationship between physiological, psychological, environmental, and socio-cultural factors when providing care to physiologically unstable clients (Clinical Judgment)
• Incorporate effective and culturally and linguistically responsive communication strategies with clients, their families, and the healthcare team (Communication)
• Demonstrate a pattern of personal responsibility, professionalism, and accountability for life-long learning (Professional Role)
• Use information and biomedical technologies and evaluate data for accuracy and use in clinical decision making and the role of the nurse in ensuring quality and safe delivery of nursing care (Informatics and Healthcare Technologies)
• Collaborate with the interprofessional healthcare team to provide coordinated care with the goal of improving health outcomes, minimizing risk and error, and facilitation of transition to the next level of care (Collaboration)
• Gather, synthesize, and use evidence from best practices that support clinical decisions for care of physiologically unstable clients (Evidence Based Practice)

• None

• Overview of critical care and high acuity nursing and goals of care
• Patient, family, and providers’ response to the critically ill experience
• Principles of Invasive Hemodynamic Monitoring
• Nutritional therapy of critically ill patients
• Comfort, sedation, and paralytics
• Rapid response teams and code management

High Acuity Conditions

• Shock (sepsis, cardiogenic, hypovolemic, distributive)
• Multiple Organ Dysfunction Syndrome (across life span)
• Neonate: necrotizing enterocolitis, Hyperbilirubinemia
• Acute respiratory failure across the life span; non-invasive and invasive ventilatory management
• Bleeding disorders (DIC and HIT)
• Acute neurological conditions - TIAs, CVA
• Acute neurological alterations and complications across life span; Increased Intracranial pressure,
• Acute cardiovascular alterations, CAD, MI, congenital disorders, TETs, cardiomyopathy
• Sickle cell disease and sickle cell crisis
• Acute endocrine disorders (DKA, HHNK, SIADH, DI)
• Endocrine disorders (pituitary, thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal disorders)
• Acute burn injury
• Acute kidney injury
• Acute trauma
• Acute GI bleeds
• Pancreatitis
• Acute post organ transplant rejections
• Organ procurement and donation (guest speakers)
• Critical care of pregnant client

• High acuity clinical experiences
• Simulation - code management, sepsis management, acute respiratory management