Advanced nursing skill certification in critical care

Advances in critical care therapies demand that registered nurses maintain skills consistent with the ability to provide safe patient care. Advanced nursing function (ANF) certification is one way to achieve this goal. The purpose of this article is to describe the annual certification process that occurs in one general systems critical care unit within a large urban acute care setting. Two hundred registered nurses are certified annually in cardioversion/defibrillation, pacemakers, intraspinal analgesia, pulmonary artery catheters and intracranial pressure monitoring. Involving both conceptual and psychomotor skill assessments, ANF certification not only challenges educators to possess and maintain current knowledge about ANF procedures, but also readily identifies areas of strength and weakness for the nurse regarding knowledge and practice development about a particular procedure. The critical care education committee recognized the need for advanced nursing knowledge in order to provide quality, safe patients care and to meet the needs of patients with complex care requirements. ANF certification has proved to be an efficient, cost-effective method to educate many nurses in a relatively short period of time. Most importantly, ANF certification assists to maintain an optimum standard of care within the critical care unit and, at the same time, lends itself well to the development of other advanced critical care procedures in the future.