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A N E S T H E S I A
numb extremity.
And you can count
on it that 30- to 50year-old male
patients in particular will still want to
get up and do
FOR MOST, BUT NOT ALL Some — but not all —
procedures are tailor-made for nerve blocks.
everything themselves without assistance, putting themselves at risk in PACU or at
home. So you can imagine the potential for injury if you don't emphasize the discharge instructions, warn the families and, in most cases,
immobilize the extremity.
Reason for regional
It's a shared view among those practicing in the regional anesthesia
field that nerve blocks should be a standard of care, and the reason is
simple. We shouldn't have different outcomes, different levels of comfort and different expediencies of discharge between patients just
because we can't offer a consistent, and consistently better, method of
care. OSM
Ms. DeBusk (blocknursing@gmail.com) is a block nurse and PACU nurse at
Baptist Health Care in Gulf Breeze, Fla., as well as the founder of
BlockNursing (block nursing .com), which provides advanced regional anesthesia education.
N O V E M B E R 2012 | O U T PAT I E N T S U R G E R Y M A G A Z I N E O N L I N E
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