Intra-Abdominal Pressure Monitoring

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We were just starting to do this in the hospital I recently left. I was wondering if anyone does this routinely, and if so what do you think of it?

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.

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Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.

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.

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Specializes in ED, ICU, lifetime Diabetes Education.

Fascinating! I am learning a lot from this thread.

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Specializes in ICU, Education.

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....

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Specializes in ICU.

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.)

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