Tyork - Welcome to the Discussion Forum

[M3Riddler]

Tina,

Thanks for joining NxStageUsers Forum. We hope that you will find the forum useful. Feel free to jump right in and post any question/comments.

We hope to hear from you soon....

///M3Riddler

[tyork]

Thank you very much for the welcome. I am excited about being able to interact with NxStage users. I am a nephrology nurse of 22 years. We are now offering NxStage to our Home patients and I want to know everything possible to be able to safely take care of my patients. No one knows more than the patients about the day-in and day-out issues that arise. I look forward to learning from you all.

[Unregistered]

You have a great attitude in acknowledging patients' experience and caring to learn all you can in order to provide the best care . Does is come from working in a unit where you are not understaffed and over worked? Because I have had few nurses like this, and the nurses in our home program come and go very fast.

[tyork]

My unit is not understaffed. I have been with FMC for over 18 yrs, one of my nurses has been here in the Home Dept for 25 yrs, the other one for 10 yrs.
I have found that in nephrology, new nurses either love what they do, or they hate it. We happen to love what we do. I developed a passion for dialysis patiaents back in the 80's working at the university here in town. I trained under a SUPER nephrologist that believed in home therapy. Therefore, I have always loved working with home patients even though I have done all areas of nephrology, acutes, chronic, HD, PD, transplant. Home is where my heart is. I am very well aware that the patient can help nurses learn all kinds of "tricks" and also can help them have a better understanding of the dialysis patieant's world.

[M3Riddler]

Tyork,

Its great to have somone join the group that can look at things from a non dialyzors perspective. Im sure you will be able to answer many questions members may have. I believe you can be a great asset to the members forum.
Also, as dialyzors we will be more than happy to answer any of your questions..We have many veteran dialyzors here.

///M3Ridler

[desertrat]

Hi Tina,
Glad you're here! It's great to have someone with such a long history of assisting with dialysis and I'm sure we can learn from each others backrounds. Feel free to "pick" our brains!
Gretchen

[Unregistered]

TY for explaining your background and positive outlook on home therapies. With your home dept. experience have you trained patients to do nocturnal HD txs? If so, for how many years has your program offered nocturnal? When did your program begin offering NxStage?

[tyork]

We have trained a couple patients but both got transplanted soon after. We are just now offering NxStage as a machine. We used Fresenius K's before

[Unregistered]

Although you only worked with nocturnal for a brief time, did you begin to see it's benefits over short txs? And did you find the time involved with training/txs/maintenance on the K machine that much more involved than with NxStage?