The critical care nurse practitioners provide care to critically ill patients and their families. The nurse practitioners provide this highly skilled care in close collaboration with the critical care physicians, critical care respiratory therapists, and other members of the multidisciplinary health care team.
The scope of practice for critical care nurse practitioners encompasses patients of all ages, from infancy through adulthood, with a variety of potentially life-threatening problems. These nurse practitioners provide care for patients on protocols from any of the institutes of the NIH through complex and vigilant assessment and interventions.
Although the patient population is widely variable, the nurse practitioners are particularly skilled in caring for immunosuppressed patients with life-threatening infections and/or respiratory failure and for patients requiring continuous renal replacement therapy for acute renal failure.