A few of my coworkers and I drove up to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas last week to attend the Critical Care Nursing Symposium, which is put on by Education Enterprises (a company who is run by Dr Laura Gasparis-Vonfrolio, who you may have heard about through the nursing speaking circuit). The conference was three tracks; one was a CCRN/PCCN review, and the other two tracks were focused on various topics in critical care.
Already having my CCRN, I didn’t attend any of the review sessions, but the critical care sessions I did attend on the first day were uneventful. Day 1 recap: session on New Cardiovascular Drugs consisted of all medications I was very familiar with; Complications of Critically Ill Patients was basic talking about sepsis, abdominal compartment syndrome, etc; ARDS looked great from the look of the powerpoint slides, but the basic review of the mechanism of breathing took up three-fourths of the allotted time and barely any time on the meat of the presentation. The first day was rough – at the end, I was regretting my decision to drive five hours and spend the money to attend the conference.
Day two started out just as rough, with the keynote leaving me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Laura Gasparis-Vonfrolio gave a speech entitled “Condition Critical” where she spoke of her perceptions of why nurses leave nursing, nurse-patient ratios, and mandatory overtime. While I’m sure these are big issues at some hospitals, they’re not big in my professional life and I felt the talk to be extremely negative and disheartening at 7am. What would have made this talk better were more solutions to the problems. For example, she mentioned that we should all create nursing corporations and market them back to our hospitals, but that was all that was said – no one at our table had any idea what that even means. I can understand frustration in the field of nursing, but I would have liked to see more of a call to action, rather than just discussing the negatives. I’ve listened to Laura Gasparis-Vonfrolio’s CCRN review DVDs in the past and she had been hilarious, knowledgable, and easy to listen to.
During that second day, I went to all four sessions presented by Carol Jacobson; on Pacemakers, ACS, Differentiating Wide QRS Tachycardias, and Cardiovascular Drugs. I loved each one of them. While the sessions on ACS and cardiovascular drugs were more basic (probably geared towards the nurse on a step-down unit), it was still full of great information for the less-experienced nurse. Her sessions on pacemakers and wide QRS tachycardias were the highlights of the conference for me.
I’m really glad that I went to the nursing conference. It was actually my first out of state conference, which was a great experience to talk to other nurses in other parts of the country and learn what they were doing on their units and what issues they were facing. It was also a great break/vacation as Las Vegas is a great place to go for any reason. While we were in bed by 10pm the night before each of the conference days to be awake and attentive, but the night after the conference we had the chance to go out and experience the city. (Photo: That’s me in the middle, Erica on the left and Melissa on the right)
