This credential has 2 parts: online modules covering adult intensive care knowledge, and a skills assessment form recording what you are competent to do. Both are required, and they prove different things. Together they sit with your other nursing credentials.
What do the modules cover?
The clinical ground an ICU nurse works on.
- Hemodynamic monitoring and what the numbers mean
- Vasoactive infusions, titration, and the parameters you titrate to
- Mechanical ventilation modes, alarms, and airway care
- Sedation, analgesia, and delirium screening
- Prevention bundles for ventilator, line, and catheter associated infections
- Recognizing deterioration and the response that follows
What does the skills assessment form ask?
What you can actually do, item by item. Forms of this kind ask you to indicate experience or competence for each skill, sometimes with a preceptor or supervisor validating it. The temptation is to rate yourself generously, and it is worth resisting. A skills form is how a charge nurse decides which assignment you get. Overstating a skill puts you with a patient you cannot safely manage, on a unit where you do not yet know anyone well enough to ask easily. Understating one costs you a conversation and nothing else.
What does the unit expect beyond the form?
Familiarity with their equipment, which no module carries across. Pumps differ, drip concentrations differ, ventilator models differ, and the protocol for a given infusion can differ between 2 hospitals in the same city. Arriving as a per diem clinician, ask early which pumps are in use, where the drip references live, and who to call about the ventilator. Competence transfers. Muscle memory for someone else's equipment does not.
Adding it to your profile
Upload both parts, the module completion and the signed skills assessment.
- Tap Menu in the top left of the Nursa app.
- Select Profile.
- Scroll to the Credentials section.
- Tap Add your Credential.
- Upload your document as a PDF, WORD, JPG, or PNG.
Sign up as a clinician and fill the form in honestly, since it decides the assignment you walk into.
