Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Special Outpatient Surgery Edition - Anesthesia - July 2019

Outpatient Surgery Magazine, providing current information on Surgical Services, Surgical Facility Administration, Outpatient Surgery News and Trends, OR Excellence and more.

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Having quick and easy access to continuous temperature readings would prove invaluable when talking with patients who feel warm and want us to turn down the heat. With a quick check of the control panel's digital display, our nurses could tell if stopping active warm- ing would be appropriate. Nurses wouldn't have to disturb resting patients to take their temperature, instead determining with a quick glance at the digital display if the reading is within an acceptable range. The non-invasive forehead sensor also eliminates the need for using esophageal or rectal catheters to take the temperature of sedat- ed patients in the OR. The new monitoring system can automatically document tempera- ture readings in some electronic health record platforms. That would take some of the recordkeeping burden off of our staff and help us meet requirements of the Surgical Care Improvement Project, which mandate the recording of a normothermic tempera- ture reading within 30 minutes before or 15 minutes after anesthe- sia end time. Efforts are heating up Are our pre-warming efforts working? Anecdotally, they are. We don't yet have hard data to back up what we're observing on a daily basis — that temperatures are more often in the normothermic range and patients are more satisfied with their care — but our hopeful addition of the forehead monitoring system will let us more easily capture and track patients' temperature readings during every phase of their care, so we'll know for certain that we're doing all we can to keep them warm, safe and satisfied. OSM 4 8 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E • J U L Y 2 0 1 9 Ms. Garrett (connie.garrett@va.gov) is a perioperative clinical nurse leader and educator at James A. Haley Veterans Hospital in Tampa, Fla.

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