perature do not help maintain normothermia. Heated air is delivered
through an underbody and lower body forced-air blanket, but if the
patient arrives to the OR cold, induction of anesthesia only makes
them colder and can drop the body's temperature by one degree,
according to research.
Implementing new routines
Considering our study's relatively low cost, you'd expect the hospital's
stakeholders would have been all in on enhancing our patient warming
protocols. They weren't. Changing mindsets is hard. Most OR staff mem-
bers are Type-A personalities. We have our way of doing things, and
change becomes personal.
Altering frontline practices wasn't easy but we knew that going in.
Ours was an evidence-based project, so we understood getting the
results we needed would involve changing mindsets, because it
involved changing routines. We also knew that permanently altering
our warming routines would take constant, consistent reinforcement.
We wanted to warm patients before surgery, but we needed buy-in to
do it. Our approach wouldn't be large scale. It would be personal. One
on one. If I talked to a nurse, the message was: This warming protocol
is directly improving patient care. It is a level higher than what we are
doing now.
I also reminded everyone that adding this extra layer of warmth was
already approved by the American College of Surgeons, the Joint
Commission and AORN. We put information in our OR newsletter,
showing why pre-warming was important for patients. I assembled two
PowerPoint presentations. One was for surgical staff and another was
for non-surgical personnel who would learn about our warming proto-
cols in an academic setting.
If you're considering a prewarming program that will require multi-
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