ice vs no ice with cardiac outputs

Specialties MICU

Published

the facility I work in does not ice the cardiac output injectate. I went to a coferance a few weeks ago and the speeker said her hospital still did. what is the norm at your facility?

No ice in our unit either.

Specializes in Critical Care.

No ice in one hospital I work, and a continuous cardiac output in another. I have never used ice in 8 years of nursing.

CC NRSE....are you frequently calibrating your SVO2 monitors? If not, maybe that's why they are not accurate.

As for the ice vs no ice.....haven't used ice since I was a student 5 years ago. Now, either use no ice (if bolus method) or Baxter CCO. Have worked as a traveler/agency in almost 12 hospitals & have never seen ice.

Room temperature is sufficient....ice went out years ago! Almost 10 years and almost as many hospitals and I have only used ice once for an old cardiac surgeon who had to have everything his way! We use CCO now, but even when we have used the old set-up, we just use room temp.

Specializes in Med-Surg Nursing.

We use room temp, NSS and use Edwards swans

Specializes in Med-Surg Nursing.

Only the intensivists and Trauma Surgeons use the CCO Swans which are also Edwards. In our CABG pt', the Swans are left in for such a short period of time that it isn't worth the cosst.

We use Baxter CCO too. If I mention ice around here, the new kids look at me like I've grown another head!!

Specializes in CCU (Coronary Care); Clinical Research.

no ice, continuous svo2...

Specializes in pre hospital, ED, Cath Lab, Case Manager.

Some Doctors insist on refrigerated NSS, some are happy with room temp. Really have never seen a differrence.

No Ice for us either.

Maybe she needs to update her lecture.

Haven't routinely used ice since the 80s when it was found to not be necessary. On rare occasion in the summer though if there's a big temperature change outside to >90 reallyrapidly the hospital ventilation system takes a while to equilibrate.

In some rooms with lots of machinery which produce heat, and a cold patient (ie sepsis with hypothermia and using a bear hugger to warm them ) the body temperature is too close to the injectate temperature and we need to chill the fluid. This happens pretty rarely, so when it happens there are sometimes issues. for instance, the computation constant needs to be changed for different temperatures of injectate and sometimes that's forgotten. We seem to do best in these situations when we just chill a 100cc bag of NSS in the refrigerator briefly so that the temperature is still in the range of our usual computation constant. I've found that abou 15 minutes in the frig works great.

As long as the fluid that the thermistor is stuck in (outside of the body) and the injectate is the same temperature, it shouldn't be a problem, right?

We don't use iced outputs in our hospital's critical care unit or in the cath lab.

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