overnight stays at $875
per day) — and came
up with $2.35 million
in savings just by stan-
dardizing our patient
warming protocols.
I'd love to tell you
what we've saved
since implementing
this system full-time to
keep patients warm
from pre-op to post-op,
but the coronavirus
limited the number of surgeries we could perform. Currently, we have
closed three-quarters of our hospital's ORs and are performing only
emergent or critical surgeries. However, our study proved warming
patients throughout the entire surgical process ultimately pays off big.
There's also a secondary benefit to maintaining normothermia. If a
patient is anxious, that extra contact with the nurse who is covering
them with a warmed blanket helps tremendously to reduce stress lev-
els. You want patients to be comfortable while they're in your facility.
This small comfort measure also helps to build trust with patients in a
short amount of time.
Improving the process
To ramp up your prewarming efforts, pinpoint the issues that arose at
your facility because you didn't place a premium on this best practice.
For my first few years at our hospital, I circulated or scrubbed for
plastic reconstruction cases and noticed that, for a number of rea-
sons, certain patients were prone to the side effects of a hypothermic
3 8 • O U T P A 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 2 0
FORCING THE ISSUE During the intra-op phase, Parkland Hospital used forced-air
warming as well as the prewarmed blankets, warmed IV fluids and warmed irriga-
tion fluid.
