Outpatient Surgery Magazine

Special Outpatient Surgery Edition - Infection Control - May 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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warmed had an average hypother- mic temperature of 35.7°C. We also discovered that pre-warming reduced the time patients spent in recovery; patients who were pre- warmed were discharged 2 minutes sooner than patients who were not. Two minutes might not seem like a significant difference, but it adds up over time. We perform about 20,000 procedures per year and estimate the couple minutes saved during each case would result in 600 fewer hours of PACU time. We completed our trial at the end of 2018. There was a general con- sensus among staff and leadership that we should continue to pre-warm patients, but we're still working through how to move forward with the new strategy. Our decision will be based in part on a couple important lessons we learned during the trial. • Consider all options. Our nurses struggled with transitioning the full-body, forced-air warming gowns into upper- and lower-body cov- ers because the material was bulky and difficult to manage. Plus, each disposable gown costs $13, a significant per-case expense based on the amount of procedures we perform each year. Several convective and conductive active warming options are available. We'll keep an open mind as we assess the cost and practical application of each one, but we'll likely opt for a method that uses mattresses or coverlets instead of gowns. M A Y 2 0 1 9 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 3 3 • AHEAD OF THE COLD Pre-warming keeps a patient's tem- perature normothermic and lessens the impact of surgery's cooling effects. Pamela Bevelhymer, RN, BSN, CNOR

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