A quality report on cold patients arriving in recovery
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The hospital's quarterly quality report shows that 27% of adults arriving in the PACU after open abdominal surgery had a first temperature below 36.0 °C last quarter. The surgical quality committee's target is under 10%. Temperatures in the PACU are taken with a temporal artery thermometer; intraoperative temperature is recorded in about two thirds of these cases. Ms. Dana Grant, the perioperative quality director and a nurse, chairs the committee and has asked anesthesia for a plan.
Your task: discuss the report with Ms. Grant and agree how the department will respond. Do not discuss the physiology of heat loss in detail. You have 8 minutes; a warning sounds at 6 minutes.3