The Journal of the Louisiana State Medical Society : official organ of the Louisiana State Medical Society
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It is a common practice to check gastric residual volumes (GRV) in tube-fed patients in order to reduce the risk of aspiration pneumonia. However, there is a paucity of scientific evidence to support this practice which consumes significant amounts of health care resources. We conducted a survey of the nursing practice of GRV checks in our hospital as part of a systems improvement project using a standardized questionnaire in a single hospital setting. ⋯ The wide variation of gastric residual checks, including unnecessary checks and withholding feedings, observed above not only increased health care costs but also has the potential to impact patient outcomes. This calls for a standardized evidence based tube-feeding protocol to check GRV and should be an integral part of hospital policy. For the benefit of the readers, we present the GRV check protocol instituted in our hospital which, based on anecdotal reports, is resulting in decreased interruptions of feedings to our patients and reducing the nursing time consumed, thus potentially decreasing health care costs.
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Managed care over the last 20 years has brought considerable attention to the impact of clinical variables on time to extubation in adult cardiac surgery. One variable that has not yet been analyzed is the endotracheal tube (ETT) size. Our retrospective electronic database review was performed on adult subjects that had a primary, non-emergent cardiac surgery in the last four years. ⋯ The means for times to extubation for the two remaining groups were 7:45 standard deviation (SD) 4:27 (hrs:min) and 7:30 SD 4:48 (hrs:min) for patients managed with 8.0 and 9.0 ETTs respectively, with no statistically significant differences between the tube sizes p=0.2389. Analysis of variance did not demonstrate a statistically significant impact with age (p=0.3199), gender (p=0.5394), body mass index (BMI) (p=0.4060), nor intravenous (IV) anesthetic adjuvants midazolam (p= 0.4815) or opiates (p=0.3617) used in the operating room (OR), but length of time on cardiopulmonary bypass did play a role (p=0.0274). These data suggest that the size of the ETT utilized during cardiovascular surgery in adult patients does not play a role in the length of time of postoperative ventilation.