This month’s Nursing Notes newsletter takes a look at the fast-paced field of emergency nursing including sub-specialties in trauma care. I got a chance to sit down with two experienced emergency care nurses to talk about the differences between emergency department nursing care and the specialized emergency field of a trauma nurse. Paul Bond is an emergency nurse with over 20 years experience in the field. He’s also the host of a bi-weekly online radio show found at EmergencyNursingToday.com. We were joined by Susan Cox, a trauma nurse at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego where she is Director of Trauma and Volunteer Services. Susan is also the President of the Society of Trauma Nurses.
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Interview with Paul Bond and Susan Cox on Emergency and Trauma Nursing
Jamie: Susan and Paul, I’m happy to have you on the show here at Nursing Notes Live. I’m excited mostly because I think it’s important to draw distinction between the specialty of emergency department nurse and the subspecialty or its own specialty in its own right of trauma nursing. So Susan I thought I would start off with asking you, what do you see is the key differences between being a trauma nurse and perhaps being an ER nurse?
Susan: Yes. I’d be glad to help with that. Actually trauma is a subspecialty of nursing. It is specific to the phase of care that you’re talking about. The emergency department or the emergency center phase of care is one phase of care in trauma nursing. So there are people who work in the emergency department. Sometimes all of the people who work in the emergency department function as trauma nurses. But there also trauma nurses in all of the other phases of care in the hospital or outpatient setting. We have trauma nurses who function on our floors. We have trauma nurses who function in a radiology department and our critical care units. They are all caring for trauma patients and have a subset of clinical expertise and knowledge that is specific to trauma patients and anticipatory knowledge and expertise in anticipating what might occur ongoingly with the trauma patient related to mechanisms of injury and what has happened to the patient. So the difference between an emergency department nurse and a trauma nurse is basically that a trauma nurse can be an emergency department nurse but there are also trauma nurses in many other phases of care in a hospital.
Jamie: It’s interesting that you say that, Susan, because I didn’t know that the trauma nurses extended beyond, say, a specific trauma center or beyond the emergency department setting but that’s very interesting that they extend into other realms.
Paul: I really didn’t either, Jamie. I understood that trauma nurses were not just in the emergency department. But my understanding was more the critical care post-ER like in a trauma ICU or those types of things – the OR. I didn’t realized that they went into radiology and the regular force too which I think was great because trauma is its own continuum of care. Since the ‘60s with the advent of the Golden Hour and everything that R. Adams Cowley did through shock trauma, we’ve noted that there’s a major difference in how you care for trauma patients versus medical patients or simple trauma patients, if you will, somebody’s just had a broken leg as compared to somebody who was stabbed or shot or fell of a building or whatever it may be.