Taking on a career in cardiac care can go in a variety of ways. With help from Julie Webster, a nurse practitioner serving as senior director of Advanced Heart Failure for Piedmont Healthcare, here are a few of the specialty areas found in the cardiac care world. Keep in mind this just scratches the surface.
In-Patient Nursing
This includes nurses working in acute care areas with patients who’ve been admitted to the hospital requiring hospital-based care. These nurses serve as the primary, 24-hour bedside care givers. You also have intensive care cardiac nurses. These are critical care nurses who recover patients from surgery or administer advanced complex patient care to the extremely ill.
Specialty Nursing
This could include scenarios such as working in a catheterization labor, and out-patient stress testing and imaging centers that are specific to cardiac nursing.
Private Practice Nursing
These nurses support cardiology physician practices in an office space setting. This involves ambulatory patients who come in for their follow-up visits with their physician. -
Jon Waterhouse
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For more information, visit the Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association (one of many information sources available online) at http://pcna.net
