ICU and Bed baths?

Published

  1. When do you bath Pts in the unit?

    • 22
      Day shift
    • 5
      Evening shift
    • 35
      Night shift
    • 20
      Whenever a staff member can get to it.

82 members have participated

I have worked at a couple different units and each had their own policy on bed baths. Where I worked last we did baths at 4am. Days said they were to busy to do them.

Just wondering what the policy at your unit is ....

Day, eve, night or whenever staff is able to get to it.

Specializes in thoracic ICU, ortho/neuro, med/surg.

In our ICU we try to split the bathing duties evenly between day shift and night shift because we have the exact same staffing for day and night (we only use 12 hour shifts, no 8s). Vented patients by default are night shift, usually. The only time vented people should be a day bath in our unit is if A) something happened and they had to get a bath! like a code brown (: or B) if the entire unit is vented, we will split evenly between shifts.

I agree we do NOT wake up people with dementia or bathe disoriented individuals in the middle of the night. Because we get a large portion of our patients up to the armchair in the morning for pulmonary toileting, often times an awake patient or a confused patient is offered a bath/bathed before getting into the chair, so we can start their morning nicely (:

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