Twelve hours on, 12 hours off. No days off for six months. Sound impossible? Such were the conditions at the outset of Jaclyn Tropp's tour of duty in Vietnam, where she gained unparalleled experience with IVs and "a feeling of confidence that I could do almost anything."

Today, as national president-elect of the Infusion Nurses Society, Tropp has ambitious plans for infusion nurses at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, where she is a clinician, and for colleagues nationwide.

"I love IV therapy because I can do so much education," Tropp said. "My goal is to make sure nurses know the right way to do things."

Tropp has strong allegiance to professional organizations, which provide know-how that nurses can use to educate patients and families. In roles ranging from recruiter to president of the Illinois chapter of the Infusion Nurses Society, she has brought in authorities for workshops and to discuss intravenous procedures, infection control and other issues.

"Our goal at Evanston," Tropp said, "is that the IV nurse will be using a lot of the equipment that is used in interventional radiology in putting [peripherally inserted catheter] lines in at the bedside." By putting a transducer that visualizes unseen veins in the hands of nurses, radiologists are free to perform biopsies and other tests that RNs can't perform, she said. "We are the vein finders for the hospital."

That "no fear" attitude and eagerness to take on technology also goes back to Tropp's Vietnam days. "I was taking care of people who didn't have any arms or legs," putting them on dialysis machines, Tropp said. "I was putting in lines that we didn't think about putting in in the United States." But the machines were the purview of Army corpsmen. Tropp said she mastered the equipment on her own time because often she was left to monitor it.

Tropp doesn't believe in the easy way out, as evidenced in what she stresses in orientation: putting IVs in veins that nurses can palpate but not see.

"If you start teaching nurses that from the very beginning instead of letting them always go for the veins they can see superficially, then they'll have a better feel for being able to put these more difficult IVs in," she said.

Tropp also emphasizes the importance of demeanor and its impact on patients. "As soon as the patient is really nervous, their veins become constricted," she said. "If you can joke with the patient, if you can talk about their family and their children and grandchildren, all this gets their mind off what you're doing. Pretty soon, you're finished and the patient says, 'When are you going to start?' "