AORN journal
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Comparative Study
The impact of parental presence on parental anxiety and satisfaction.
Researchers used an experimental research design to vary the amount of parental presence during their children's anesthesia induction and recovery and measured the effect of parental presence on parental anxiety and satisfaction with care. The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory was used to assess parental anxiety. ⋯ Overall satisfaction scores were high, with little variability and no significant differences between study groups. Parents and physicians and nursing staff members supported the practice of parental presence during children's anesthesia induction and immediate postoperative recovery period.
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Perioperative staff members encounter many occupational exposure hazards in the workplace. Cytotoxic agent exposure is a relatively new hazard that perioperative staff members are experiencing as more surgeons use hyperthermic intraoperative intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIIC) to treat patients with abdominopelvic cavity malignancies. ⋯ The National Cancer Institute, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations provide guidelines for the safe administration and handling of cytotoxic agents. Institutions in which cytotoxic agents are administered should use these guidelines to develop policies, procedures, and educational programs to protect surgical patients and perioperative staff members.
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Many perioperative managers record operating room times (ORTs) and use average ORTs to facilitate scheduling of elective surgical procedures. A second statistic, the upper 95% prediction level (ie, 95% chance the next ORT will be less than the upper prediction level) can be calculated from previous ORTs and used in scheduling elective procedures. ⋯ Upper prediction levels can provide perioperative managers better knowledge than average ORTs to facilitate decision making during the scheduling of elective surgical procedures. This method can be used to find upper prediction levels for any desired measure of procedure duration (eg, surgeon, scheduled procedure-specific times).
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Effect of continuously warmed i.v. fluids on intraoperative hypothermia.
The investigators examined the effect of infusing continuously warmed (ie, 37.0 degrees C [98.6 degrees F]) i.v. fluids in two groups of middle-aged female patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy procedures. They hypothesized that increasing i.v. fluid temperature during surgery would decrease patients' risk for hypothermia. ⋯ Analyses of covariance, with the first intraoperative temperature measurement treated as the covariate, revealed nonsignificant results at the P < .05 level. The results suggest that administering continuously warmed i.v. fluids intraoperatively has no significant effect on maintaining patients' body temperatures during short laparoscopic surgical procedures.