Changing the Sedation Status Quo in the ICU

 

Informed Patient: Changing the Sedation Status Quo in the ICU

I found this article written by Health Blog to be very interesting and accurate. It discusses how many hospitals are now adopting new treatment methods in ICU’s to reduce the length of time patients spend sedated and immobilized on a ventilator. Nurses and doctors are now encouraged to wake patients from sedation and assess their pain and get them to breathe on their own as soon as possible due to the suffering that is noted from prolonged delirium in long ICU stays. This sort of delirium can have a huge and long-lasting effect on cognitive function and even cause PTSD for some patients. This article argues that patients do much better when they are liberated from ventilators, and have shorter hospital stays and shorter rehabilitation times.

The next steps needed in order to enact this policy in hospitals nationwide would be to get the evidence based practice and research out there and accessible. If patients will have better outcomes by simply decreasing the amount of sedation time and the amount of time on a ventilator, we should be advocating for our patients and creating policies that will bring this issue to light.