WESTERN GOVERNORS UNIVERSITY
Developing Your Acute Care Skills
Acute Care Skills
Every day, hospitals and emergency departments treat patients with severe medical conditions, injuries, and illnesses that require prompt action. Healthcare professionals offer acute care, which helps stabilize the patient’s condition as other necessary medical interventions are administered.
Acute care skills are significant in timely diagnosis and treatment, comprehensive patient care, stabilization, and team collaboration during life-saving interventions. Mastering acute care skills diversifies your medical career path, making you a highly sought-after medical professional.
This guide will define acute care skills, discuss their importance and benefits, and explain how you can learn and use them.
What are Acute Care Skills?
Acute care skills refer to the knowledge and expertise needed to work effectively in a critical care unit to stabilize patients in dire conditions to save lives. This may include emergency response, trauma care, medication administration, pain management, or neurological assessment.
Acute care is an elevated level of healthcare focused on providing medical interventions to patients with severe injuries or conditions. Acute care helps in stabilizing patients and supporting them throughout the recovery journey.
Why are Acute Care Skills Important?
Acute care skills are integral to treating patients with severe injuries or dire medical conditions. Medical professionals with acute care skills can develop diagnostic procedures, stabilize patients, administer medication, or manage pain.
Here are several reasons why acute care skills are important in the medical profession:
- Life-saving interventions: You can attend to patients in critical conditions to reduce injury or illness severity that could result in death. Life-saving interventions may include cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the Heimlich maneuver, or the administering of heated intravenous fluids in cases of severe hypothermia.
- Patient stabilization: You can assess a patient’s airway, breathing, circulation, and neurological status to identify any life-threatening issues. After stabilizing the patient, you can offer emergency medical care to prevent their condition from worsening and increase their chances of survival. Patient stabilization is performed before or alongside more definitive treatments like surgery and may include pain management, psychological support, and airway management.
- Timely diagnosis and treatment: You can detect early signs of a condition before it worsens. Timely diagnosis enables caregivers to administer preventive or curative medication to manage or treat the condition in its early stages.
- Comprehensive patient care: You can assess the impact of a condition on a patient’s life and well-being and provide ethical, clinically appropriate, and coordinated healthcare services to meet their medical needs. Comprehensive patient care involves preventing, treating, and managing life-threatening physical or emotional conditions.
- Adaptability: The healthcare industry is always evolving, and unpredictable circumstances like workload, shifts, and urgent care roles abound. Acute care skills help you develop the flexibility to work in diverse environments and respond to different patients’ reactions.
- Team collaboration: You learn to collaborate with other medical professionals to identify patients' medical needs and design personalized diagnosis, treatment, and care programs. These skills help you communicate effectively, access and interpret critical information, and monitor the health status of patients to minimize the risk of severity and death.
What are the Benefits of Having Acute Care Skills?
Acute care skills are significant in offering life-saving interventions, stabilizing patients, providing comprehensive care, and adapting to diverse work environments. These skills give you the tenacity to work in high-pressure medical environments, learn quick decision-making, and excel in the challenging yet rewarding healthcare environment.
Here are the benefits of developing acute care skills:
- Career versatility: You gain the expertise to excel in diverse medical settings such as emergency rooms, intensive care units, trauma centers, and even pre-hospital environments such as accident scenes and ambulances. Acute care skills prepare you to pursue dynamic career opportunities in healthcare.
- Patient advocacy: As a patient advocate, you can support patients, ask questions on their behalf, and foster relationships between patients and medical staff. Patient advocacy ensures that patients receive timely, high-quality medical care and services and that they are not discriminated against.
- Professional development: A proficiency in acute care demonstrates your ability to excel under pressure, make critical decisions, and offer life-saving interventions. These skills can lead to enhanced responsibilities and new career opportunities. You can advance your medical career to offer pre-hospital, emergency, or trauma care to help patients recover from severe physical and emotional conditions.
- Pursuing advanced practice roles: Being certified as an acute care nurse opens new career opportunities, giving you the power to provide advanced care as a primary physician. You can research, run diagnostic tests, and create personalized treatment plans that suit the patient’s needs, from infants to the elderly.
- Rewarding and fulfilling: Saving lives is worthwhile and gratifying. You attend to patients in life-threatening situations, stabilize them, and walk them through recovery. The role of an acute care nurse is also financially rewarding, with an average salary of $120,575 as of July 2023.
Examples of Acute Care Skills in the Workplace
In the workplace, acute care skills are essential in providing emergency response services, pain management, and ethical decision-making to reduce the severity of life-threatening conditions, stabilize patients, and save lives.
Here are scenarios where you can use acute care skills in the workplace:
Emergency Response
Healthcare providers can design a framework that provides timely emergency support. Emergency response teams can assess the health status of patients in dire need to identify life-threatening conditions, prevent the condition from deteriorating, reduce suffering, administer medication, and save lives.
Medication Administration
Acute care nurses can examine, conduct diagnostic tests, create treatment plans, and monitor their patients. They can prescribe medication by adhering to medical administration guidelines giving patients the correct form and dosage of medicine.
Wound Care
Acute care nurses can tend to a patient’s wound to help halt bleeding, administer antiseptics, and closely monitor the healing process. Medical practitioners can review and create plans to manage and treat different wounds to quicken the healing process and prevent severe infection.
Ethical Decision-Making
Medical practitioners can navigate complex medical scenarios involving critically ill patients. With a deep understanding of the medical condition, treatment options, and prognosis, they can evaluate the benefits and potential risks of different medical interventions.
Ventilator Management
Respiratory therapists assess their patients' respiratory status, determine appropriate ventilation settings, monitor vital signs, interpret blood gas values, and promptly adjust ventilator parameters to optimize oxygenation and ventilation.
Diagnostic Procedures
Clinics or hospitals can provide clinical intervention by analyzing a patient’s health status to identify a condition, disease, or severity of an injury. Acute caregivers use diagnostic procedures to create treatment plans that suit the medical needs of patients.
Pain Management
Acute care practitioners can assess the pain level of a patient to administer and manage the right pain medication. Pain management may include physical therapies like exercise and heated cold packs and psychological therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy. Practitioners can also prescribe medicines such as local anesthetics, opioids, and acetaminophen.
Neurological Assessment
Healthcare workers can evaluate patients’ nervous system to identify any abnormalities that affect the optimal functioning of the brain, spinal cord, and nerves. Neurological assessments help establish brain and nervous system dysfunction like cognitive decline, headaches, seizures, and muscle weakness and create the right treatment plan.
How Can I Use Acute Care Skills?
Acute care expertise is one of the most in-demand skills today. Every three minutes, a person dies from an injury in the United States, necessitating the need for professionals who specialize in emergency response, trauma care, and injury prevention to save lives and promote public safety. By coordinating with other healthcare professionals, acute care experts offer comprehensive care and create a favorable medical outcome even in the case of an injury.
Here are various ways you can use your acute care skills in healthcare and beyond:
- Provide trauma care: Trauma nurses can offer emergency care in a time-sensitive and high-stress environment to minimize the severity of life-threatening injuries and conditions. This may include swift assessment and triage, monitoring vital signs, and administering life support measures.
- Promote smooth nursing operations: Nursing administrators can strategically allocate resources and coordinate interdisciplinary teams to offer high-quality patient care. They can facilitate seamless communication and optimize healthcare delivery within their healthcare institution.
- Provide nursing care to newborn babies: Neonatal nurses can provide specialized and meticulous care to newborns with critical health needs. This may involve assessment of the delicate status of premature or ill infants, monitoring vital signs, and administering medication.
- Offering emergency room care: ER nurses can deliver rapid and adept care to patients in urgent and critical conditions. These nurses provide immediate care, stabilize patients in crisis, and contribute significantly to positive patient outcomes.
- Handling life-threatening conditions: Critical care nurses collaborate with their medical team to deliver specialized and intensive care to patients facing life-threatening conditions. This can be done by analyzing patients’ complex medical needs, monitoring critical indicators, and offering advanced medication management.
How Can I Learn Acute Care Skills?
You can learn acute care skills in MSN or post-master's certificate programs offered at WGU.
With our health-related degree programs, you'll be able to:
- Manage pain, ventilator, and provide wound and trauma care.
- Develop diagnostic procedures and neurological assessments and administer medication.
- Advocate for patient needs, wishes, and concerns.
- Apply knowledge of patients pathophysiology when analyzing lab data, test results, physical assessment data, telemetry, invasive monitoring, and vital signs.
- Assist healthcare providers with diagnostics or procedures.
- Communicate medication contraindications, incompatibilities, and side effects to the prescriber, if necessary.
The baccalaureate degree program in nursing, master's degree program in nursing, and post-graduate APRN certificate program at WGU are accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (http://www.ccneaccreditation.org).
Frequently Asked Questions
To acquire acute care skills, you can pursue formal education and training in healthcare such as a B.S. in Nursing at WGU’s Leavitt School of Health. You can also gain hands-on clinical experience after your formal training by working in acute care settings, which include hospitals and intensive care units, under the guidance of more experienced professionals.
Yes, you can transition into acute care from other healthcare specializations. However, you’ll need existing healthcare knowledge and skills to give you the foundation. Additionally, you can acquire specific competencies relevant to acute care such as completing a degree program in nursing.
Yes. Continuing your education helps you learn new trends and knowledge that can enhance your acute care skills. You also stay up to date with the latest advancements, protocols, and best practices in the rapidly evolving field of acute care.
