Nurse's Role in Therapeutic Hypothermia

[trider73]

Hello everyone,

I am new to this site so please be patient with me. I am a senior in nursing school and I am taking an online Research class. Our group is doing research on the role that nurses have during Therapeutic Hypothermia. We need articles that are written by nurses. I was hoping that we could get some input from everyone, because we are so lost. Our research question is, What methods used for cooling during therapeutic hypothermia provide the fastest recovery? We found plenty of medical data, but we have not been able to find anything that has to do with data collected by nurses.

Thank you so much for your time!!!!

-Travis

[Dodongo, APRN, NP]

I don't know about any research publications, but we use either the arctic sun hypothermia machine or the blanketrol. Both are pretty similar. We put the temp probe in their esophagus or rectum, wrap the water cooling blankets on their head, thorax and legs and the machine basically does all the work.

[Esme12, ASN, BSN, RN]

Welcome to AN! The largest online nursing community!

moved to nursing student assistance for best response.

[nurseprnRN, BSN, RN]

Suggestions:

Call the manufacturer's reps for a few of the systems and ask them for papers. They have lots of them.

Ask your college librarians if they have a membership to EBSCO, an indexing service, and look in their CINAHL, the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health Literature.

Read up on some of the general hypothermia literature so you can get some ideas on complications of hypothermia, which should get you thinking about the things nurses would watch-- labs chiefly, esp pH and bleeding (HINT HINT)-- and therefore things to manage. You might find more in the ER literature than you think.

Do not limit yourself to the last 5 years of literature, even though your faculty probably told you (erroneously as it turns out) that only recent stuff is worth spit. As it turns out, open heart surg ran people hypothermic and returned them to the ICU chilly (like 35ºC or less) for years before somebody figured out that many of them do better if you warm them up to close to normothermic before you take them off bypass. So look at some of the older open heart nursing lit too.

[NicuGal, MSN, RN]

You can look neonatal and adult info. For infants, some only do head cooling, others do total body cooling. There is a difference in outcomes with these.