Christina Enstrom embraces her passion for being a nurse. To her, nursing is not her career, but her calling. She is especially proud to be a Children's Hospital Colorado Nurse. Every day Christina is an excellent caregiver, caring, and compassionate with all of the patients and families that she encounters. She is respectful to families, peers, and providers. Over the past year, Christina increased her hours to accept a full-time position. At the same time, Christina applied for and received her Clinical Nurse III with an emphasis on asthma education and Point of Care laboratory education. She is also a flu captain champion as well as a TB mask fitter. In addition, Christina, also recently oriented several new RNs for the Network of Care.
But on a very specific day in December, Christina saved a life.
At Wheat Ridge Urgent Care, new roles have recently been initiated to maintain patient safety, increase flow efficiency, and improve patient family satisfaction. We now have an RN who has a "visual" on the waiting room who talks with the family and uses the Pediatric Assessment Triangle to quickly assess and ascertain the child's acuity. On this day in December, Christina was in this role. A family came in asking that their pre-school aged son be seen in urgent care. They also mentioned that their 7-month-old daughter had been sick but didn't need to be seen. This 7-month-old was in her car seat with a blanket over it. Christina, being an excellent critically thinking nurse, lifted the blanket to view the baby. She noted pale lips, retractions, nasal flaring, and excessive mucous in and around the baby's mouth. After placing a pulse ox on the baby, and noting saturations in the 70's, she brought the baby and the family back to our trauma room. Within minutes, the team was stabilizing this critically ill patient, maintaining her airway, and providing CPAP to improve and achieve oxygen saturations in the low 90's. The Transfer Center was called. When it was communicated that critical care was 90 minutes out, the decision was made to call 911 to transport this baby to an Emergency Department. The baby was taken to Lutheran ED where she was placed on BiPap and transported to Children's Hospital Colorado by critical care Air One team and admitted directly to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.
The Lutheran team called the Wheat Ridge Urgent Care Team, expressing their opinion that the rapid recognition and transport of this patient saved the baby's life. This gracious outreach of respectful admiration was well received and appreciated. However, it was Christina's extraordinary critical thinking skills, confidence in her nursing instinct to visually recognize a critically ill baby (that was not even a patient at the time) and immediately initiate care that evolved into a timely lifesaving intervention that truly saved this baby's life. The family did not understand the seriousness of the situation and had this baby not been acted upon in this quick manner, the outcome would have been much different.
Christina's peers and the entire team are so proud of her and feel that she is undoubtedly a true DAISY Nurse.