The COVID-19 pandemic changed a lot of units, hospitals, and health care workers. One way it changed our unit - 3GH ICU - is that we started taking care of ECMO patients. Our unit is predominately medical-surgical patients, with a variety of oncology, liver transplant, septic shock, and respiratory failure patients. When we started putting COVID patients on ECMO, many CVICU nurses started working on our unit to manage the ECMO machines while we took care of the COVID patients themselves.

Brian Mclaughlin is one of the CVICU RNs that worked a lot on our unit, and my colleagues and I are all so thankful that we have been able to work with him these past 2.5 years. He picked up a lot of extra hours to help staff our ECMO needs, and so therefore spent a lot of time on our unit. He will always help with a turn, even if it isn’t an ECMO patient.

When the nurses’ station is empty because we got an admission or have a crashing patient, he will answer call bells, phone calls, and hand things to nurses stuck in COVID rooms. I remember when we had a string of cardiac patients on our unit that required Q4H FICK scores and performing thermodilution. Because we were less familiar with these patients, we asked him for help. He enthusiastically taught us how to perform thermodilution, first by showing us and then allowing us to do it ourselves. That will always stick out to me because that patient wasn’t even on the side of the unit he was on, and he walked over to a different unit and took the time to teach us.

Our unit is ever evolving, and now we have a separate ECMO “unit.” Bryan is now one of the lead ECMO nurses, taking on the role of managing incoming ECMO patients from outside hospitals, assessing code blues and rapid responses throughout the hospital to see if that patient could be a potential ECMO patient, and managing the staffing of ECMO specialists between our unit and CVICU. He has taken on a lot of tasks I’m pretty sure he isn’t mandated to do - going above and beyond to make on-call shifts more convenient for the specialists, and developing an entire website with an abundance of resources and information for us to reference when in the role of ECMO specialist on shift.

As a new ECMO specialist, I am so thankful for him. As lead ECMO nurse, he is always willing to teach. I feel so comfortable approaching him with questions, and he provides simple, easy to understand answers. He gives us scenarios in our downtime to help us train to be better specialists. He walks unused ECMO machines over from other units to help simulate live situations. We all feel safer when he is around because he is a wealth of knowledge and always quick to help out.

Brian is still helping out around the unit when he is available. He is still answering call bells and phone calls. The other day, the team had to emergently place a transvenous pacer at the bedside and he helped us set the pacemaker up. When he is ECMO lead, he is primarily on our unit, and despite the fact that he is technically on a separate team, he acts like an extra resource to our unit when he can. His willingness to be a helpful team player, his kindness towards those who are learning, and his passion for teaching and growing our ECMO program are some of the many traits that make Brian an amazing nurse.

Thank you Brian for all you do to help improve patient care and outcomes, and grow better nurses!