ICU RN

In a sole-community acute-care hospital, the ICU is where minutes decide whether a patient stays, transfers, or goes home. You will be the clinician who steadies shock, protects the airway, and keeps families clear on what is happening and why. This role exists so critical care is available close to home—skilled, calm, and accountable on every shift.

Performance Objectives

• Stabilize newly critical patients in the first hours: complete a focused assessment, start priority interventions, and reverse early deterioration before it becomes a crisis.
• Hold ventilator, sedation, and vasoactive goals: titrate to ordered parameters so gas exchange and blood pressure stay in range and unwanted side effects are caught early.
• Run your role in codes and rapid responses to ACLS priorities until the patient is safe, the team is aligned, or care is appropriately escalated.
• Drive the day’s plan with physicians, respiratory therapy, and pharmacy so procedures, medication changes, and step-down or transfer happen on time and without preventable error.
• Brief patients and families in plain language on status, next steps, and what to watch for, and document that conversation so the next shift inherits a clear plan.
• Prevent harm each shift: verify high-alert medications, protect lines and devices, close critical results, and follow sepsis, ventilator, and fall bundles.
• Leave a complete, real-time record and flag system gaps that threaten outcomes so the unit can fix them, not repeat them.

Environment & Resources

You practice in a community ICU within a nonprofit hospital of about 100 acute-care beds. You report to the ICU nurse manager and work beside hospitalists or intensivists, respiratory therapy, pharmacy, and ancillary staff. Bedside monitors, ventilators, infusion pumps, a rapid-response pathway, and the hospital EHR are your core tools. Education and staffing are built around safe critical-care competency, not volume.

Essential Qualifications

• Active RN license in New Mexico or compact license; current BLS; ACLS required.
• BSN preferred.
• 1 year of experience in the related specialty preferred; recent ICU or step-down experience with ventilated and hemodynamically unstable patients; newer nurses only through a formal critical-care residency.
• Hands-on skill titrating vasoactive infusions and sedation to parameters, with arterial-line or equivalent monitoring experience.
• Calm, precise communication with physicians and families during deterioration and goals-of-care talks.
• Reliable medication safety, bundle compliance, and real-time documentation under a full patient load.

• Direct suction and ventilation on your own shift, with a team for the sickest turns—not a hand-off.
• A place where overtime is rare and call is limited to the sickest patients, not routine staffing.
• Specialty-level ICU exposure without the pressure of a huge urban census.
• A place where experience is still about saving the person in front of you.

Compensation: $33.75–$52.74/hr based on experience (capped at 15 years). Sign-on bonus: $20,000 for 1–10 years' experience, $30,000 for 10+ years — half at 90 days, half at 2 years, 2-year commitment. Relocation assistance for candidates over 100 miles away: $3,500 at 100+ miles, $5,000 at 500+ miles, paid at 30 days, 1-year commitment. Degree pay: BSN +$1.00/hr, MSN +$2.00/hr. Night shift differential +$3.25/hr for hours worked between 7p–7a. Weekend differential 10% of base pay. Float Pool incentive +20% of base pay.

How to Apply

If you want the next shift to count, apply now with your license, your BLS and ACLS, and one line about the sickest patient you have steadied. This is the ICU where your decisions still matter.