Prepare for PACU with confidence

What your PACU 90-day path covers

• ✓What the anesthetic leaves behind
• ✓Emergence: delayed, agitated, and the difference between them
• ✓Residual neuromuscular blockade
• ✓Awareness, recall and what the patient took away
• ✓Airway obstruction in the recovery unit
• ✓Hypoxemia and hypoventilation: two problems that look alike
• ✓Laryngospasm and negative pressure pulmonary edema
• ✓Extubation, reintubation and the airway you cannot get back
• ✓Hypotension after anesthesia
• ✓Hypertension, tachycardia and the arrhythmias that matter
• ✓Bleeding and the deteriorating surgical patient
• ✓Myocardial ischemia in the perioperative period
• ✓Acute pain and why multimodal analgesia works
• ✓Opioids, respiratory depression and the patients at risk
• ✓Regional anesthesia: blocks, neuraxial techniques and what wears off
• ✓The difficult pain patient: tolerance, dependence and chronic pain
• ✓PONV: mechanism, risk scoring and why it matters
• ✓Aspiration, the full stomach and gastrointestinal complications
• ✓Antiemetic pharmacology: classes, combinations and their costs
• ✓Hypothermia: how it happens and what it costs
• ✓Shivering, hyperthermia and the temperature that is not hypothermia
• ✓Fluids, electrolytes and glucose in the recovery period
• ✓Malignant hyperthermia: the crisis that starts before the fever
• ✓Perioperative anaphylaxis: recognizing it when everything looks like something else
• ✓Local anesthetic systemic toxicity and the lipid rescue
• ✓The pediatric patient in recovery: airway, emergence and the parent
• ✓The older patient and the patient with obesity or sleep apnea
• ✓Pregnancy, comorbidity and the patient whose chronic disease came with them
• ✓Discharge criteria: scoring systems and what they are actually for
• ✓Handover: the transfer of information and of responsibility
• ✓Ambulatory discharge home: instructions, safety nets and what patients actually remember
• ✓Standards, phases of care and staffing in the recovery unit
• ✓Safety culture, incident reporting and learning from what nearly happened
• ✓Advocacy, dignity and consent for the patient who cannot speak for themselves

Start with a free gap analysis

Before you study anything, AscendRN's gap analysis shows you exactly where you stand across the ten competencies that matter for pacu — patient assessment, pharmacology, prioritization, and more. You find your gaps here, in minutes, instead of at the bedside. Then your path adapts to close them.

Free to start. No card required.

Join thousands of nurses preparing for their specialty on AscendRN.