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Nurse Practitioners

With 15 nurse practitioners (NP) on staff, the NPs are an integral part of the Critical Care medical team. Each NP has specialty training as either a Critical Care or Acute Care Nurse Practitioner. Children's plans to be staffed with 18 NPs by the end of 2005, and will eventually add NPs to other areas of the ICU.

The NPs manage the patients admitted to the 11th floor Trauma/Neurosurgery ICU, 2nd floor Cardiac ICU and the Intermediate Care Unit. They each carry a caseload of 3 to 6 patients, oversee up to 16 patients after rounds with the attending and fellow and provide medical management in collaboration with an attending intensivist. Their role includes taking histories and physicals on patients, writing medical orders, writing daily progress notes, performing procedures for patient stabilization and ongoing care such as intubations, central venous lines, arterial lines, lumbar punctures and chest tubes. The NP also serves as a liaison for consulting services.

The NPs are active in formal and bedside teaching of ICU fellows, nurses and respiratory therapists. The NPs provide a monthly lecture series on a variety of ICU topics, lecture to the ICU attending and fellow physicians and teach in academic programs for Nurse Practitioner training. A majority of the NPs are preceptors or faculty at either the University of Texas at Arlington or the University of Pennsylvania. The NPs also speak at national and international professional conferences.

Children's ICU serves as a clinical rotation site for NP students training in Acute or Critical Care. The University of Texas at Arlington, Rush University in Chicago, Illinois and the University of Pennsylvania send students to Children's for rotations with the NPs in the ICU. Maeve Sheehan, M.D., is the Medical Director for the Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Practice at Children's and Joe Don Cavender, RN, CPNP is the Director of Advanced Practice Services.

For more information, contact Joe Don Cavender at 214-456-2801 or e-mail joe.cavender@childrens.com.