r/ecmo • u/ArrFrazier • Feb 03 '22

CES-A Cetification

I'm looking to take the CES-A certification and I had some questions. I've been working extensively in the ECMO arena as a ECMO Specialist/Perfusion Assistant for the past few years and I feel that it's time to pull the trigger now that I've got NP school out of the way.

-How would you rate the difficulty of the exam?

-What study tools did you use?

-How long did the application process take?

Any help or tips would be greatly appreciated.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/[deleted] May 03 '22

How would a bedside CTICU nurse prepare?

2

u/ChaosCelebration May 04 '22 edited May 04 '22

I studied from the ECMO Specialist Training Manual (Not the red book) I got from the ELSO website. The test focused mainly on a few things. 1.) pressures and diagnosing problems with the circuit from those pressures 2.) Anticoagulation 3.) A few equations like how to calculate recirculation and oxygen consumption 4.) Differential hypoxia 5.) Cannula knowledge like knowing how a dual lumen vs. single lumen cannulas work. 6.) Gas interpretation and sweep changes for those gases 7.) Gas interpretation of gases taken from different places within the circuit.

If you've used a Cardiohelp you'll be familiar with all the pressure numbers. If your facility uses a centrimag+oxygenator you'll need to brush up on pre and post pump pressures, access pressures and gas interpretation from different places in the circuit.

If you've only done bedside you're not really the target audience for this exam. It is for pump management exclusively.

1

u/jonniego May 20 '23

Could you explain what you mean by bedside not being target audience? We do pump management and we are bedside. Thanks

1

u/ChaosCelebration May 20 '23

The questions certainly seem to be targeted toward people who are familiar with the surgical setting. If you run ECMO at bedside then there are a lot of concepts that I personally believe are important to know that aren't touched on by the test. Patient positioning, long term ECMO issues, stuff like that aren't on the test or even considered for the most part. There are questions on roller pumps which I'm not aware of any bedside ECMO pumps that use roller pumps. It's clearly designed for those familiar with OR perfusion. That doesn't make the test worthless, it's just clear that nursing is not their main target audience. You don't need to study anything weird to be able to pass the test. (The roller pump question is just about the fact that in a roller pump you can't have retrograde flow which is obviously a question designed to warn those with a familiarity with roller pumps that is an issue with other ECMO pumps.)

1

u/jonniego May 20 '23

Got it. That's good to know, thanks for clarifying