Day in the Life of a Postpartum Nurse

Hey guys, I want to take you through a day in the life as a postpartum nurse so that if you have any interest in this area of nursing, you’ll have a better idea of what a typical day is like. So just some things to consider. They can be set up a little differently. So we can have an LDRP. And what that stands for is labor and delivery and then recovery postpartum. So it’s basically one room that they get from the start of the hospital stay until they’re discharged. So they labor in it, they deliver in it, they recover it, and then it’s their postpartum room. In other hospitals you might rotate. So you might be on the L & D floor and do your labor delivery recovery and then go to a separate postpartum room. So sometimes if you work in an LDRP, you are going to be a labor nurse and a postpartum nurse and also taking care of the baby. So there can be just in ways that are set up. So just something to consider when you’re looking around for jobs. Some places we’ll do couplet care. So what that means is after the mom has delivered she’s on a postpartum floor and you have one nurse that is gonna take care of both the mom and the baby.

So that’s couplet care. Other places do non couplet care. So that just means that you’ll have one nurse for the mom and one nurse that will take care of the baby. So just depending on how it’s set up, another consideration is catching. So catching, it’s where a nurse is assigned to go to the delivery and catch the baby. So some places are set up where the labor nurse does all the catching. Some have a separate nursery where a nursery nurse will go and catch and other ones, the postpartum nurse will come down and catch the baby of the patient that she is going to end up receiving, um, once they’ve recovered after that. So just something to consider. So if they, if a postpartum nurse is the one catching, then you’ve got to kind of have to break up your day and go down, run down to attended delivery. So just kind of an interesting way that some places do it.

All right, let’s look at some different skills. So don’t worry. These are things that you’re going to learn more about and get better at. I know in nursing school you have one class that you take where you learn your postpartum assessment and your newborn assessment, so you will get better at this. This is stuff that you have to be really good at. So doing your normal head to toe, right? Head to toe assessment and then adding in the postpartum piece. So checking the fundus, the bleeding, all of that extra assessment, things that go with postpartum, you also will have to be really good at your newborn sets assessment. So you have to spot the abnormal. The babies can’t talk, they can’t tell you what’s going on. You have to be the eyes and you have to look for everything.

So you will get trained on this, but just something to consider. It’s an extra skill. The skill I wanted to mention is neonatal resuscitation program or NRP. This is just how babies are resuscitated. So it’s kind of like your basic life support, but for babies. So just kinda how we go through the process of resuscitating when there’s a problem. It is really important for in the delivery room. And then of course a baby can change very quickly. So if something happens and we actually have a lesson on NRP if you want to check that out in one of our courses, that kind of goes through the basics of what that is.

All right, so a typical day, let’s go through the good, the bad and the ugly of it all. So you’re going to get report. Now, depending on the facility, it’s going to be a little bit different. Some places as the postpartum nursery are getting three to four couplets. Other places that don’t do that couplet care, they will get six to eight to postpartum mothers that they’ll be taken care of or six to eight newborns. So that’ll vary depending on whether it’s couplet care or not. And that’s a lot of patients, right? The next thing is you’re going to go through and do your assessments and then of course chart everything you are going to give education for everyone. But more importantly, you want to make sure that all your discharge education is done. There is a lot of education that goes to these patients when they’re being discharged for their care and baby care. So you want to make sure that this education is done and charted and then assist with any circumcisions. So help the doctors when they are coming to do a circumcision on a baby.

If it’s your baby, you will have to step in and kind of be the assistant for that. So a lot of things going on in the first few hours of the day. Then you’re also going to discharge any patients that have orders and also of course be getting admissions as people deliver and are ready for postpartum care. So the discharging patients, you have an order, you want to go through all the discharge instructions and make sure that all that education is given. So some challenges that come up in this field. So bondings sometimes the moms do not bond well and you kind of have to help catch this and facilitate. The last thing we want to send mom home has already struggling with postpartum depression, and who hasn’t bonding and going to be able to take care of this baby. So you have to be on the lookout for that. And that can be a challenge. Also everyone is ready for discharge at the same time. They always all want to leave ASAP, right? So that can be a challenge cause you’re trying to let everybody know that you still have to go see this other patient and then you’ll be back and so on. So that can be a challenge. The other challenge, and I say this to hopefully prevent this for you, these moms are typically, and babies are healthy, right? So you can, it happens where people will, nurses will get used to the healthy and not be able to react quick enough in an emergency. So you always want to be on your toes. You always want to be ready if an emergency happens and it’s not you, you should step in and help. Okay. It kind of helps keep your skills up, help you going.

But this is a big challenge that postpartum nurses get into because they’re used to these healthy patients. And then when something goes wrong, you have to be able to react quickly. And then the last one is there could be some challenging populations. So we have a lot of drug users at our hospital and that can be really difficult because you don’t get to say this baby can’t go home with them. Sometimes that can be a little bit difficult. Sometimes there’s going to be family drama. You know we get sometimes the Jerry Springer episodes happen in the hospital where you have two dads showing up. Or we had one dad one time who had his wife in one room that had delivered and the next day his girlfriend was in the other room that had a baby. So you never know what you’re going to get. So there can be some challenges within the populations that you’re caring for as well. Alright, so some key points to review here. There can be challenges. So just decide if these challenges are things that you are willing to deal with. Um, it can be very rewarding, right? You get to see these new babies come into the world and help this family bond and educate them and it’s an exciting time. There’s gonna be some really hard days and there’s gonna be some really awesome days.

So if this type of assessment here, this fundal assessment looks fun to you and caring for patients that are doing things like this, feeding their baby and bonding and that looks good, then this might be the right field for you.

All right guys, I hope you learned a little bit more about what it’s like to be a postpartum nurse. We’d love you guys and I’ll go out and be your best selves today. And as always, happy nursing.