Intra-Abdominal Pressure Monitoring

We just got a device for measuring IAP that is simple to use called the abvisor. For years we struggled with getting measurements by rigging a system, usually after the patient was in trouble, and the doctors didn't believe them half of the time. I am hoping that with this product we will start measuring earlier. At NTI this year there was a great general session on abdominal hypertension and I think that after fluid resuscitation many of our patients show the signs that the presentor talked about. We should be catching this earlier and a good product to standardize I am hopeful will be the first step.

Please post some feedback on how useful and easy to use this system is and how much money it saves your unit so that I can lobby for us to get it too!! We do IAP measurements so infrequently that most of our staff have no idea how to do it. We might only do one measurement on one patient and then discard the transducer, the tubing and all the connectors that are used. This has got to be not only more accurate but cheaper!

Hard to say what the overall savings are yet but I think that catching IAP earlier will provide more opportunity to do something about it. Our infection control nurse already likes the abvisor because we are no long accessing the foley again and again. I've set one up and have cared for 3 patients that had one. It's so much easier than our home made system and took probably less than 5 minutes to set up. You just spike a bag of NS, put the valve between the foley and urine bag tube and plug it into the monitor then leave it alone. It uses only 20 cc's of NS and you just aspirate and infuse - that's it. We've used in on a few abd surgical cases and a bad pancreatitis. I think we may start watching the bad sepsis also because they get so fluid overloaded. The doc's love it because they have confidence in the number - and so do we nurses.

Our usual offenders are our little liver transplants... immunosuppressed... so LET'S just access the foley a dozen times then wonder why the kid's got a UTI.

Fascinating! I am learning a lot from this thread.

I think hospitals could save lots of bucks by just using what we have.... pressure bag, saline, 60 mL srynge, foley, monitor.... That's what we did and it worked well. I don't understand throwing money away. I 'll take it....

Just did a bladder pressure (aka IAP) for the first time ever during my last shift. I'm in a teaching hospital. We also jerry-rig a system because the fancy pre-packaged ones are a little too pricey, apparently. Ours sounds very similar to everyone else's...basically a zeroed-out a-line setup with a needle inserted into the foley port, then you clamp off the foley, flush 50ml NS into the bladder and see what it says. In this case it was ordered to get a baseline for a septic belly. My understanding is it's not completely accurate unless the patient is paralyzed. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)