Advanced Practice Provider, Burn

Physician Assistant Or Nurse Practitioner

The Physician Assistant (PA) or Nurse Practitioner (NP) focuses on surgery patients in the hospital and in outpatient care. The scope of the patients may include, but not limited to: acute burn, burn reconstruction, aesthetics, breast reconstruction, hand, maxillofacial, and general reconstruction surgeries. The PA or NP provides restorative, curative, rehabilitative, palliative, and maintenance care.

Responsibilities include managing and directing surgical inpatient and outpatient burn patients in a surgical/ICU care setting, serving as a health care provider for patients admitted to the burn ICU under indirect physician supervision, responsible for critical care and step down admissions with indirect supervision from on call physician, providing full coverage to burn surgery inpatient and outpatient services, providing cross coverage to plastic surgery patients as directed by collaborating physician, ordering routine and special laboratory test, radiograph studies, EKGs and interpreting their results, prescribing medications according to Standards of Practice, providing admission history and physical exam, progress notes, doctor's orders (cosigned within 24 hours), responding to service calls when physicians are in surgery, maintaining membership in various committees within the Burn Center and attending as required, participating in burn performance improvement projects and presentations to include but not limited to daily and weekly burn rounds, weekly burn conference, multidisciplinary committee work, journal clubs, mortality and morbidity review for the burn service, preparing letters to physicians, government agencies, nursing homes and home health providers in order to assist in providing for patients needs and to assist staff medical officers with providing reoccurring and long-term care, assisting the institution to prepare for JCAHO accreditation and American Burn Association Certification, contacting patients and family members to arrange for surgical consents before operations and special procedures, gathering and exchanging information with the patients and family members, consulting with medical personnel to exchange information and plan operative actions/procedures necessary to meet the needs of the patient and contribute to the patient's care, surveillance of care, providing non emergent and/or in house on call services for hospitalized patients as needed under the direction of burn medical director, obtaining prescriptive authority based on state guidelines once practice hours are achieved and maintaining required CMEs, prescribing medications from the approved list, ordering preoperative and post-operative laboratory tests and radiographic studies, interpreting results and treating as appropriate.

Qualifications include special privileges and skills such as phlebotomy, venous/arterial pressure monitoring devices, ACLS, EKG, I & D, wound irrigation and debridement, excision and grafting of burn wounds under the supervision of the surgeon, selecting and obtaining skin grafts from donor sites, wound care and dressing changes, removal of skin sutures, performing escharotomy under indirect physician supervision (requires special privileging), assisting with operative fasciotomies, compartment pressure measurement, adjustment of ventilators and their settings, intubation and extubation, first or second assist in burn cases under direct supervision of the surgeon, specialty certification if available and appropriate.