Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an icu staff nurse and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.

An ICU Staff Nurse is tasked with the primary role of providing first care to patients with life-threatening medical conditions such as invasive surgery, road accidents, and organ failures. He or she will perform careful assessment and monitoring of patients? progress for any changes and offer correct solutions when need be. He or she will also get to offer personal care to the patients from time to time.

Other duties that he or she can perform are; treating wounds and injuries, observing and recording all vital signs and symptoms of the patients, ensuring that all critical lifesaving machines are working properly, performing diagnostic tests, administering medications to the patients and assisting the doctor to perform certain medical procedures.

Core Skills Required to be an ICU Staff Nurse

Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.

Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.

An icu staff nurse should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.

Negotiation Skills:

Negotiation Skills are a deliberative process by which people settle their differences through an acceptable agreement to both parties to co-exist without argument and dispute in the workplace.

An ICU Staff Nurse must learn to resolve any disputes that arise in the workplace using the principles of fairness, seeking mutual benefit and maintaining a cordial relationship that builds a success at the workplace.

Teamwork Skills:

Teamwork is the process of collaboratively working with a group of people with an aim to achieve a set goal within a business ensuring that the staff and management cooperate using their skills and provide constructive feedback.

An ICU Staff Nurse needs to exercise effectiveness and understanding in creating teamwork using the right techniques in an environment of trust and cooperation with the aim of increasing productivity, higher morale, and a fulfilled workforce.

Multi-Tasking:

Multi-Tasking allows one to juggle and perform more than one task at a time without losing track of what you are working on or dropping the ball.

An ICU Staff Nurse must learn the trick of multitasking and help the staff balance the competing demands of their time and energy that they are expected to handle multiple priorities every day without compromising on the effectiveness of the work done.

Delegation:

Delegation is assigning responsibility or authority to another person a junior or subordinate to carry out specific activities while remaining accountable for the outcome.

An ICU Staff Nurse must be equipped with skills on how to make the delegation work correctly to save the organization time and money and to allow the subordinate make wise decisions, skills, and motivation to become better and grow the company.

Personal Drive:

Personal Drive is a combination of desire and energy in its simplest form directed at achieving a goal in whatever you have set your heart to accomplish.

An ICU Staff Nurse needs to creatively design ways that drive the staff to carry out their work without wasting time by helping them understand and develop their self-motivation skills that assist them to take control of many different viewpoints of their life.

Persuading Others:

Persuading others is making sure your best ideas get a fair hearing without manipulating others or using trickery.

An ICU Staff Nurse needs to creatively learn how to introduce new ideas that will boost growth for the company without managing the staff or put them under pressure with more work but with manageable goals that the employees will delight working on and grow as they do.

Role Awareness:

Role Awareness is the ability to be informed of your role in a given environment as well as understand the expectations placed on a position and to see how they are met apparently.

An ICU Staff Nurse must assess, measure and quantify his employee's awareness of their roles to see if they are transparent about what is required of each of them and review what kind of results they are delivering from their understanding.

Using Common Sense:

Using Common Sense is the ability to see what is missing in a situation or a project and supplying it without necessarily being assigned or asked to do it.

An ICU Staff Nurse needs to creatively train his employees always to see the missing element that is typically crucial in any workplace or project and take the opportunity to do business out of it.

Quality of Work:

The quality of Work is the value of work or products produced by the employees as well as the work environment they are provided with.

An ICU Staff Nurse needs creativity in assisting all teams in identifying characteristics that will result in a quality product and lead to greater efficiency and increased productivity by following the four critical outcomes of employee retention, customer satisfaction, profitability, and productivity.

Product Knowledge:

Product Knowledge is an essential sales skill to understand the features of your product allowing you to present the benefits compellingly and accurately to the customer.

An ICU Staff Nurse should ensure the teams understand the company's goods or services and can quickly take a client through them, therefore, instilling faith, trust and respect in the customers which in turn creates a positive customer experience.

Hard Skills Required to be an ICU Staff Nurse

Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.

Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.

An icu staff nurse should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.

ICU Staff Nurse: Hard skills list

Adolescent Care
Administration of Medications
Advance Cardia Life Support (ACLS)
Antibiotic Therapy
Assisting in Surgery
Assisting With Exams and Treatment
Basic Life Support (BLS)
Bedside Monitoring
Bladder Irrigation
Blood Administration
Blood Glucose Testing Devices
Cardiac Care
Care of Gastrostomy Tube
Catheter Care
Catheterization
Central Line Dressing
Certifications
CCU
Charge Nurse
Chemotherapy Administration
Clinical Research
Communication
Critical Care
Data Management
Dialysis
Discharge
Documentation
Dressing Application
Dressing Change
Dry Sterile Dressing Application
Electronic Health Records
Emergency Room
Family Education
Geriatric Care
Healthcare
Healthcare Management
Healthcare Software
Home Care
Hospice Care
ICU
Infection Control
Injections
Inpatient Care
Interpersonal
Intramuscularly Injections
IV Therapy
Lab Testing
Licensure
Maintaining Patient Charts
Management of Open Wounds
Maternal Care
Medical/Surgical
Medications
Monitoring Vital Signs
Neonatal Care
Obstetrics
Operating Room
Pain Management
Patient Assessment
Patient Care
Patient Education
Patient Evaluation
Patient History
Patient Monitoring
Patient Safety
Pediatric Care
Physical Assessments
Prenatal Care
Psychiatric Care
Record Keeping
Rehabilitation
Seizure Precautions
Shunt Dressing Change
Specific Gravity
Sterile Scrub Sponge Change
Suctioning of the Tracheotomy Tube
Surgical
Surgery Preparation
Suture Removal
Team Work
Telemetry Care
Time Management
Total Parenteral Nutrition and Lipids
Tracheotomy Care
Transparent Wound Dressings
Urine Testing
Venipuncture
Wet Sterile Dressing
Withdrawal of Blood Samples
Wound Irrigation

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