Week 4 Discussion

The article I had was titled, “Informed Patient: Changing the Sedation Status Quo in the ICU,” by Laura Landro. The article talks about changing the treatment methods in the ICU to improve patient outcomes. The new approach includes waking patients from sedation to assess pain and getting them to breathe on their own as soon as possible. This gives the patient a break from being in delirium for too long which can cause effects on cognitive function. Also, by lowering exposure to potent sedative medications and shortening the duration of delirium in the ICU, this can prevent some part of brain injury. Lastly, getting patients up and moving even when on ventilator can prevent muscle weakness.

I agree with these new methods because I feel that this will shorten the length of time in the ICU and ultimately get the patient to a healthier state sooner, and that is always our goal.

The next steps are to gel the senior nurses to adapt to these new methods as the article states that they are having trouble with this. To help with this new graduate nurses are being trained with this new method in the ICU.

– Brittany Sandoval