Advanced medical-surgical nursing - Essay Example

rocedures and equipment, coping with incomplete and rapidly changing medical knowledge, addressing workforce shortages and ensuring appropriate adherence to correct procedures with right nursing attitude. These finer concepts in nursing when applied lead to the identification and establishment of a patients risk management process within the overall ultimate design of a health care process. Such processes are more required at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU)/facilities of any hospital as ICU is one of the most critical services of any hospital and the quality of such critical patients response is important in determining the success of the entire hospital itself.

In the following paragraphs we examine the application of the finer concepts of nursing care in three specific areas of nursing the critically ill patient. Areas discussed, with relative analysis are; airway management, sensory imbalance/overload and family communication within the intensive care unit. The discussions in these areas of nursing care become more pertinent if the patient is mechanically ventilated. Both short and long duration airway management in critically ill patients require substantial caution and skills.

Right approach which can be termed a model approach is still being evolved in research algorithms. Difficult ventilation has generally been reckoned as a state in which a trained anesthetist experience inability to maintain the oxygen saturation more than 90% using a face mask for ventilation and 100% inspired oxygen, given that the pre-ventilation oxygen saturation level was within the acceptable range.(American,1993) Difficult intubation ,on the other hand, has been reckoned as the need for more than three intubation attempts or attempts at intubations that last more than 10 minutes.

(American,1993) Schwartz et al (1995) furnish data that 3% of critically ill patients hospitalized suffer death within 30 minutes of administering emergency intubation, and another 8% of intubation events