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getting popular.
• What's the preferred way to warm
patients? Our survey of 216 readers
found that warmed blankets and
If you warm only patients who
are in the OR for 60 minutes or
more, remember that patients
lose a great deal of heat within the first hour of surgery.
forced-air warmers are far and
away the preferred methods of
preventing hypothermia.
Banking patient's heat
in pre-op
A growing body of evidence supports the clinical benefits of maintaining normothermia throughout
the patient's surgical experiBEST PRACTICES
When Do You Warm Patients?
W
e asked our survey respondents to tell
us when they typically warm patients:
• 63.3% do so pre-operatively
• 90.2% do so intraoperatively
• 76.7% do so post-operatively.
"We warm in
pre-op for total
joints and any
abdominal
cases. All
cases are
warmed intraop," says a
respondent.
ence, starting in pre-op.
How many of your colleagues pre-warm patients
before they're wheeled into
the OR? One-third (33.2%) of
the 216 OR leaders we surveyed pre-warm for all procedures, and 14.2% do so for
procedures expected to last
more than 1 hour. The thinking behind that hour-orA P R I L 2 013 | O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E | 5 5
