Page 57
H Y P O T H E R M I A
and "prevent patient shivering."
Besides increasing patient comfort and hastening recovery from anesthesia,
warming has many proven clinical benefits, chief among them that it prevents
hypothermia and maintains normothermia to reduce the likelihood of such postoperative complications as infection, bleeding and hematoma formation.
Warming your patients not only increases comfort and satisfaction, but leads to
measurably faster discharges.
4. How do you warm? There's no shortage of ways to warm a patient.
Between convective (forced-air) warmers, table pads, blanket cabinets, heated
fluids, underbody warming mattresses and other methods, you've got a lot of
options to help you keep your patients between 36°C and 38°C. Here are the
most popular warming methods our survey respondents employ (our survey
