Introducing Critical Care

We also address the identification of the use of self-care mechanisms for the nursing and midwifery workforce, introducing coping strategies to promote self-health.

The programme will introduce you to a set of resources, which provide flexible and accessible learning. These may be revisited at any time and accessed for your learning and development.

This is a developing resource and more learning will become available over time.

This resource is free for everyone to access, however, if you are not an RCN member, you will first have to sign up for a free 'contact' account here. RCN members should login using their existing details.

If you have already signed up for the programme, you can access it here (and bookmark this page for future use).

When navigating Introducing Critical Care please use Google Chrome and not Internet Explorer.

Please note, due to the time taken for the Learning Management System to refresh its userbase, it may take up to 20 minutes after your first login to access the course.

The aims of the programme are that upon completion of this programme the participant will be able to: 

1. Discuss the principles of Critical Care (ICU’s) treatment and monitoring for people who are very ill.
2. Identify the roles of the specially trained healthcare professionals within critical care.
3. Identify and use self-care and coping strategies to promote self-health and well-being for the nursing and midwifery care workforce.

Participants will achieve the following learning outcomes at the end of the programme: 

1. Recognise concepts of critical care;
2. Recognise the principles of critical care nursing; 
3. Demonstrate an understanding of the multidisciplinary team roles within critical care; 
4. Recognise and act upon the signs of deterioration in a patient in critical care;
5. Recognise and support needs of family and carers;
6. Recognise, assess and treat common physical and psychological symptoms in the critically ill patient;
7. Recognise the need for resilience in self and others and introduce areas of wellness. 

We value your feedback on our resources and would appreciate you filling in the short evaluation form at the end of the module. This will enable us to add relevant practice based content to the resource and ensure updates provide the most current evidence based educational resources.