Ensuring Child Safety During Common Medical Procedures: Video Discusses Risks of Over Sedation
CHICAGO, Sept. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The safety of children could be at risk when they undergo common procedures involving sedation, such as for fracture reduction, laceration repair, and incision and drainage of an abscess. To address these concerns, the Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety has released a video featuring Dr. Melissa Langhan (Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Emergency Medicine, at Yale School of Medicine).
"We do a lot of sedations in the emergency department. It is helpful to know the limitations of our sedations, when our patients are getting into trouble, and when to enhance patient safety in those cases," said Dr. Langhan.
In the video, Dr. Langhan discusses case studies, such as one involving an intoxicated adolescent. While the patient was waiting, he was being continuously electronically monitored with a capnography, as well as with pulse oximetry and a heart rate monitor. Had he not have been monitored, most likely no one would have noticed his deteriorating condition:
As I walked by the room, I heard his capnography monitor beeping, and when I went in there, the patient was apneic. Meanwhile his heart rate monitor and his pulse oximetry were all normal. In fact, his mom was sitting next to him and no one may have noticed that he had become apneic if it hadn't been for that monitor.
As a study by Dr. Langhan and her colleagues published in Pediatric Emergency Care found, 72 percent of the episodes of prolonged hypoxia were preceded by decreases in ETco2 as measured by capnography. This suggests that the use of capnography would enhance patient safety by decreasing the frequency of hypoxia during sedation in children. A capnograph is monitoring device that measures the concentration of carbon dioxide that a person breathes out in exhaled air and displays on a numerical readout and waveform tracing.
"Medical guidelines for monitoring during general anesthesia recognize the importance of monitoring with capnography," observes Dr. Langhan. "Unfortunately, continuous capnography is not routinely used outside of the operating room. Capnography can really enhance patient safety, and healthcare professionals need to think about using it more often. As our study found, using capnography enhanced patient safety, by being able to detect declines in end tidal CO2 indicating hypoventilation which could lead to hypoxemia."
About Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety
Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety is a non-profit 501(c)(3) whose mission is to promote safer clinical practices and standards for patients through collaboration among healthcare experts, professionals, scientific researchers, and others, in order to improve health care delivery. For more information, please go to www.ppahs.org
Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwZmTXfFWy0
Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20131024/CG03341LOGO
SOURCE Physician-Patient Alliance for Health & Safety
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