NIHSS stroke scale

Hi
Excuse me as I am in the UK-but what is MSICU?
The NIHSS (National Institute for Health STROKE Scale) was as you say developed for Stroke patients.
I guess you could use it on head injury patients to assess neurological deficit, maybe???
What other type of patients do you care for?
If they are doing it at admission to screen for stroke then it's not really appropriate and a Stroke screening tools ie ROSIER,MENDS,FAST would be better.

Hope this helps!

MSICU= med/surg icu. last weekend i had a patient who came from OR post craniotomy for suspected glioblastoma.usually, we won't do an NIHSS on her, but since they want us to have it done on all patients, we did it anyway. does it make sense?

This is a good question and one that was asked by our staff after we instituted the same policy. First, you are right that the NIHS is used for stroke. What we found is that there has been resistance to using the NIHS and often the folks who resisted did not have the best neuro assessment skills. Neuro exams without a scale have often been subject to a wide range of subjective rather than objective interpretation and difficult for one person's assessment to be validated by anothers. In short, it helped to standardize everyones exam.

It isn't perfect, but there aren't too many scales out there and it is the most used so it acility and another. Once you have it under your belt it won't take any time at all to perform.

Sorry, the key board died so the rest of the message did not make it. I was going to say that it provides a common language between shift, departments and other facilities.

I think it would be beneficial to have stroke as a separate speciality on the all nurses forum.
I am sure that not all stroke patients in USA are cared for on ICU, and certainly here in England although we have regional neuro ICU s, they are generally for neuro trauma/surgery patients and run by neurosurgeons, so very few stroke patients make it there.Even "general" ICUs which is all most county hospitals have are very reluctant to take stoke patients, unless they had the stroke post surgery or have also had an MI!
Our stroke patients are cared for on a stroke unit which started off as a ward for elderly medical patients, so you can imagine it is a difficult transition for staff. That is why we only have the Stroke NP,Stroke physicians and research nurses doing NIHSS.
We have developed another obs chart for use on high risk stroke patients and for for post thrombolysis. It is a 24 hour chart which evaluates conscious level, speech and limb power on a quantified scale.It also has BP,pulse.O2 Sats,temp on it and has instructions on how to respond if changes meet particular criteria.
Some "stroke" units may have one 6 bedded bay (we only have 2-3 private rooms on a ward and usually they are for infectious patients of those that are dying) for hyperacute stroke patients and offer continuous monitoring, but we don't have that yet.
We also have the rehab patients on the same ward!
What I am trying to say is that stroke is high priority in most developed countries and deserves to be a speciality in its own right here.
Agree?

With the advent of Primary and Comprehensive stroke centers starting to come into play and the evolution of a national standard such as Get With the Guidelines stroke is on the doorstep of being a subspecialty. It has had more time to evolve into a specialty for our physicians (USA) but has not made that transition for nursing.

I couldn't agree more with a dedicated stroke forum. It would provide fast and more efficient searching for answers and sharing of the wealth. OK that may sound like a presidential political statement so I will clarify, the wealth of knowledge.

By helping, supporting and sharing with each other we not only provide nuturing for the few who go into this field but improve the standards of care for our patients.

Lets do it!