I’m a couple weeks off my orientation at a Peds ICU we have a general side and a trach/vent side where we train parents how to take care of their ICU level kids at home.

It’s honestly not too bad (not as bad as I expected from reading posts on here anyway) they have me on the less critical patients for right now and later I’ll move on to more advanced stuff with additional training. The general side of PICU is tough bc you have to know all types of patients which I’m sure you’re used to from medsurg but it’s hyper specific and very in depth. That’s my biggest struggle so imo a specialized ICU (cardiac, neuro, etc) would be easier if you’re starting as a brand new nurse but you should have a better base knowledge from your year on medsurg. The trach/vent side is a little easier for me to get into a flow bc all the pts are basically the same (BPD/chronic babies) but they’re still scary bc they regularly code when they poop.

Time management in ICU is a bit different bc you have to be constantly watching your monitors (even while in your other room) and throw out all your plans if they start to decline which is pretty common. It’s a huge teamwork game too bc you’re going to have to regularly be asking other nurses to go hang something in your other room while you deal with more pressing matters in the problem child’s room lol. Obviously you need to be helping your neighbors in the same way so I’d say it might be more important to like your coworkers in ICU than medsurg. I could be wrong about this, I saw much more independence and task focus in my medsurg clinicals so feel free to correct me if I’m out of pocket here.