Do not be like me.
I forget important stuff. I have two left feet. I often fail to see the bleeding obvious. I make piles of silly mistakes and do a lot of stupid stuff.

Come to think of it:
If you were to travel to each of the villages in this area, and from each village find the village idiot.
And then, if you were to collect all those village idiots and move them all to a new village.
Well in that village…. I would be the village idiot.

But despite my position in the village hierarchy, I do try to aspire to be an uber nurse (and I think I should at least get a few points for trying).
Uber is from the German, meaning over or beyond. It is used as a prefix to describe a superlative example of its kind. So here are my suggestions of a few essentials you must attend to in order to transform and transcend yourself into the Uber ED Nurse.

get organazised.

First of all you will need to get your shit together. Its time to organize your personal and professional productivity once and for all.
There are many systems around for organizing and prioritizing your stuff, one of the more popular being David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). Apparently Mr Allen studied Zen Buddhism and Beat poetry, and later put a master’s university program on hold to study black-belt karate.
His path to spiritual enlightenment led him down the road of personal-growth consultancy (uh-oh), in which he uses his books and seminars to teach others how to simplify their thoughts and increase efficiency by achieving a state of ” mind like water .”
Don’t let all this mystical appellation put you off. This book offers many practical solutions based on developing a five-step plan to collect, process and organize information.
As with all these sorts of personal growth materials, try it out, extract and integrate what works for you and discard the remainder.

get actualized.

Phew. So now you are organised, its time to get actualized. Abraham Maslow believed that we all experience an innate gravitation towards healthiness and self actualization. To become an Uber ED nurse you must first become the best possible human being you can be. This will probably take at least a few days, so Maslow offered a few guidelines to help you on your way.

• Experience things fully, vividly, selflessly. Throw yourself into the experiencing of something: concentrate on it fully, let it totally absorb you.
• Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defence) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth): Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.
• Let the self emerge. Try to shut out the external clues as to what you should think, feel, say, and so on, and let your experience enable you to say what you truly feel.
• When in doubt, be honest. If you look into yourself and are honest, you will also take responsibility. Taking responsibility is self-actualizing.
• Listen to your own tastes. Be prepared to be unpopular.
• Use your intelligence, work to do well the things you want to do, no matter how insignificant they seem to be.
• Make peak experiencing more likely: get rid of illusions and false notions. Learn what you are good at and what your potentialities are not.
• Find out who you are, what you are, what you like and don’t like, what is good and what is bad for you, where you are going, what your mission is. Opening yourself up to yourself in this way means identifying defences–and then finding the courage to give them up.

Your time starts….now.

get specialized.

Emergency medicine is a big wide world, and there is a lot to learn.
One good strategy is to develop a habit of picking one task or condition that you have bumped into during each shift and take just five minutes to learn or review some information about it. Every day.
For example if you have used an insulin infusion today you might like to read up on that, or perhaps DKA or cannulation. Here is my favourite site for doing this sort of thing.

Building on that, you can pick an area of emergency medicine that interests you (for example: trauma management, paediatric life support, aged care, mental health) and focus on developing a specialized knowledge in this area. In our own department we have many nurses with specialized areas of knowledge and they become invaluable resources.

get wired.

An Uber ED Nurse thinks fast on their feet and has an ability to think laterally, as well as medially, proximally and distally.
gamesforthebrain.com will sharpen your acumen, improve your memory, nurture your problem solving skills and give you yet one more excuse for putting off scrubbing clean the bed-pans for a couple of minutes.

Being alert and on the ball can prove difficult as the shift drags on. Particularly during those long long night shifts. But the Uber ED Nurse is not drug assisted. A couple of coffees may indeed help keep us from falling asleep in a pool of dribble as we write up our notes, but we all know our limits no?

And whilst we’re on the topic of documentation, the Uber ED Nurse stands out from those lesser mortals hunched over their notes scribbling mindlessly. Your documentation should dance.
www.pentrix.com will soon make you the Obi-Wan Kenobi of scribing and a master in the secret Jedi arts of penmanship.

get informed.

Now that your life is beginning to transform into fulminate Uberness, you may wish to examine your current lifestyle, health and hobbies. Time Magazines 50 coolest websites of 2006 will give you plenty of food for thought whilst surfing the wave of popular culture.
Hmmm… I guess impactEDnurse must have come in at number 51.

get uberized.

With this new-found uber-ocity purging through your veins, you now have the opportunity to get organized, get actualized, and hold your own in conversation with the worlds coolest and most beautiful people. Yes, even orthopaedic surgeons.
You are well on the way to ubernurse.
Use your powers only for good.

get feedback.

Do you have any suggestions of websites, skills, strategies that may fast-track our journey to uberdom?
Please. Spill.