Critical Care Tech

Some operations are so important that even the assistants need assistants. A hospital emergency room is one of those operations. On any given night, an ER might experience a never-ending deluge of people suffering from broken bones, heart attacks, gunshot wounds, and other ailments. To make sure everyone gets the care they need, Doctors need help from Nurses, and Nurses need help from Critical Care Techs, who keep the emergency room running smoothly by providing very basic care to patients and completing miscellaneous administrative tasks.

If you’re a Critical Care Tech — short for “Critical Care Technician” — you’re often a trained Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) or a Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA). Either way, your responsibility is the same: You help Nurses run the emergency room.

Because you’re not a Doctor or a Nurse, you’re limited in the amount of patient care you can provide. Still, you often perform very basic tasks like checking patients’ vital signs, dressing their wounds, and giving them baths. In the event of an emergency, you’re also trained to give CPR.

Mostly, though, you’re a behind-the-scenes helper. For instance, you clean the emergency room, answer phones, restock depleted supplies, move patients, and prepare beds and rooms for new admits. Often, you also take care of the medical equipment that Physicians and Nurses use in the emergency room, which means setting it up, transporting it, cleaning it, and putting it away.

Basically, you do whatever little things need doing so that Doctors and Nurses can focus on the big things: treating patients and saving lives. Think of yourself as a sort of lubricant: When you’re a Critical Care Tech, you run around the emergency room oiling the medical machine whenever its gears start to get jammed!