The Main HUS Desk!

Hi there and happy weekend!

Firstly, in last week's post, I said that I witnessed the procedure in which nurses were attaching a Wound Vac to a baby. Just to clarify, the procedure was not a surgery and I did not witness the surgeries that the patient had before. A Wound Vac is a device that fastens the healing of a wound after surgeries. I saw the process in which they were attaching it to the child’s post surgical wound. A lot of you asked about it in the comments, so I'm sorry if I wasn’t clear enough!

Anyways, this week I shadowed the PCA who was in charge of the main desk of the NICU, called the HUS desk. As I have shadowed a PCA before, I knew that PCA stands for Patient Care Assistant and they have various jobs from being in charge of the technical aspects, making specific milk formulas, helping the nurses in any situation where needed, or taking specific orders, but I wasn’t aware that they also are in charge of the main desk. Although this week I didn’t observe a profession that is more hands on in the patient's’ treatment, it was very interesting to see how many various tasks the main desk performs, as it is informally called by many of the people who work there as the “heart of the NICU”.

Some of the many jobs included: responding to or tending to patients’ families questions or concerns, answering phone calls on the behalf of the NICU, ordering or requesting specific supplies such as diaper cream or a product to be added in the milk formula, sorting through paperwork or patients’ portfolios, or helping the nurses with certain logistics. Basically, there’s a lot to do. Without the HUS desk, the NICU probably could have seemed a bit disorganized. That’s probably why it’s also known as the “heart of the NICU”; it was literally the center of the entire facility.

On the wall behind the main desk was a whiteboard with the all patients’ names color coded and ordered corresponding to the doctor that was in charge of the care. And next to whiteboard was a door that opened into the doctor’s officer, where all the doctors sat at their desks filling out reports, talking, etc. Since the doctors’ office was directly behind the main desk, many times the patients’ families came to talk to the doctors to learn more about the current situation or to ask a question. Out of the many interactions that I witnessed between the doctors and the families of the patients, the one that caught my interest the most was a conversation that was in spanish!

As the family didn't know English fluently, the doctor talked to them in Spanish. After the family left, she said that she learned Spanish while younger and that it has really helped in her profession. Not only is it easy for her to communicate to families who speak Spanish, but it also is easier for the families to trust the her as they can fully understand what the situation is and any other details related to their child’s treatment.

Anyways, that’s all for this week! Thank you for all the amazing comments and feedback you have been giving for the past couple of weeks! And until March,