The New NICU Nurse: Your Orientation Survival Guide (The New Nurse Field Guides)

The orientation companion they should have handed you on day one.

Nursing school taught you the theory. It didn't teach you how to read a 24-weeker's isolette like a second language, titrate feeds by the milliliter, or talk to a terrified new parent about a baby smaller than your hand.

The New NICU Nurse turns the overwhelming first months of neonatal intensive care nursing into something you can actually navigate — one shift at a time. Whether you're a new graduate starting in neonatal care or a nurse crossing over from another specialty, this field guide gives you the scaffolding nursing school skipped.

Inside you'll find:

- What NICU orientation really looks like — and how to grow from shadowing to your own assignment

- Growth, thermoregulation, and the focused assessment, so you can think like a veteran, not just chart like one

- Every core skill: isolettes, CPAP and neonatal ventilation, feeding advancement, phototherapy, and lines

- Labs and growth numbers decoded — what they mean and what to DO, not just the numbers

- The high-acuity presentations you need to recognize fast: RDS, NEC, sepsis, congenital heart defects, HIE, and more

- Neonatal resuscitation, codes, and the critical moments that test everything you've learned

- How to chart to protect your license, hand off with SBAR, and escalate when it matters

- The human side of neonatal care — family-centered care, kangaroo care, grief, and staying whole in a demanding specialty

- 15 in-depth chapters on topics like ROP screening, hearing screening, discharge planning, multiples, NAS, and NICU imaging

- A full quick-reference appendix (labs, meds, growth charts, abbreviations) and a built-in orientation workbook with shift logs, reflection prompts, and a competency tracker

You belong here. And you're going to be good at this.

Part of the Call Light Chronicles Field Guide series — practical, honest companions for nurses navigating the hardest parts of the job.