title: From novice to advanced beginner: the critical care internship.
abstract: Our unit is a 12-bed medical-surgical intensive care unit in a small central Florida community. Finding experienced critical care nurses to fill vacancies is very difficult. We have offered a critical care internship for the past few years to attempt to augment our staff. Without the resources of a unit-based educator or clinical nurse specialist and with a very limited budget, we are committed to improving our internship to provide us with safe, competent critical care nurses who are willing to become members of our team. A literature review was conducted, and recommendations were developed to improve our current internship to better meet the needs of the unit and the beginning critical care nurses.
authors.affiliation: Tennessee Tech University, Cookeville, Tennessee, USA. judyjoduvall@earthlink.net
authors.forename: Judy Jo
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Duvall
mesh_terms: D003422:Critical Care; D004506:Education, Nursing; D005431:Florida; D006801:Humans; D007397:Internship, Nonmedical; D009741:Nursing Staff, Hospital / Q000193:education* / Q000600:supply & distribution; D011231:Preceptorship