What Should You Know Before Being A Neonatal Nurse?

You might have been thinking about choosing neonatal nursing as your career. Immense love for infants and new mothers. This fulfilling career may bring benefits to the lives of the patients and your life. As a neonatal nurse, you will be working in nurseries offering varying levels of care to the infants with birth defects, severe illnesses, healthy babies, or premature babies.

A neonatal nurse if the registered nurse or RN who may have a diploma, associate, baccalaureate, master’s, or doctoral degree. they can work in the Level 1,2,3 nurseries. A level 1 nursery cares for healthy infants who need minimal care like feeding, bathing, and changing diapers.

A level 2 nursery offers an intermediate level of care like specialized feedings, giving intravenous fluids, and monitoring oxygen supply. The level 3 nursery is the most advanced one, which takes care of severely ill babies. Such nurseries manage ventilators, offer care to babies who have undergone surgeries, and provide technically complex care. 

Basic Skills 

• As per a nursing agency in Barnsley, every institution establishes practice skills for neonatal nurses and the most common expectation is being able to perform math calculations. An infant would require only a fraction of the medicine doses and you should be able to ascertain that rightly. If the wrong dosage of medicine is given to an infant, it can lead to further complications. Even when you are tired or sleepy, you cannot afford to give a wrong medicine or dosage.
• You should be technically proficient with various skills like starting intravenous, using feeding tubes on very tiny infants. You may even have to draw the infant’s blood from their narrow and delicate veins.  
• You have to be compassionate and emotionally stable while working with babies. Seeing those little ones losing life just after being born or suffering from life-threatening diseases requires a heart of steel. You may have to take care of babies who are born at 6 months and cannot even breathe on their own. 

 

• You should also be able to manage the intravenous lines, use specialized equipment like ventilators and incubators, as well as perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
• You should also possess physical stamina so that you can run around as and when required. Being a neonatal nurse means attending infants with complicated health issues and even a one minute delay can cause irreversible damage to those babies. You will have to continuously monitor them and report any changes to the doctor as soon as possible.
• Having organizational skills is also crucial because you will be taking care of an infant who cannot take medicines on their own, eat on their own, or even express their symptoms.
• The developmental stages of a baby and adult are a lot different. You should be able to identify as well as assess any changes from normal in the infants. This becomes more challenging because a tiny baby cannot communicate verbally. They may not even cry to express their pain. 

Duties And Responsibilities 

The duties and responsibilities of a neonatal nurse are more serious than a regular nurse. This is because of the following reasons –

• Infants cannot communicate to reveal their symptoms and pain. A neonatal nurse has to understand if a medicine is causing digestive issues or allergies just by monitoring the premature baby. The infant can only cry to express whether it is hungry, in pain, sleepy, or lonely. A neonatal nurse must make sure all the symptoms and signals of a sick infant are understood.
• Infants require extra care because they are more delicate and prone to grabbing illnesses very easily. The nurse has to ensure everything around the baby is sanitized and clean so that infections can be kept at bay. They should not allow any outsiders to meet the baby without precautions. 
• Another responsibility is to understand and monitor how the infant responds to a treatment or medication. The body of a small baby reacts contrastingly to different medical treatments. If the nurse is unable to decode how their body is reacting, they may be bereft of suitable treatment. Moreover, even temperature change and oxygen levels have to be monitored. A slight change in temperature can cause fever, flu, and cold, which can complicate the baby’s condition.
• A neonatal nurse also has to educate and support the stressed parents of the little one. Seeing their newborn in incubators and NICUs can be stressful and heartbreaking for the parent. You will have to assure the parents that their babies are safe and be compassionate during challenging times.

The Takeaway 

Tiny babies and infants require special care when they are in the hospital. Their bodies may be less developed and not immune to infections and external surroundings. So, a neonatal nurse has to be careful, expressive, compassionate, and calm all the time. They also have to offer immense support to the parents of such children.