Operating Room

[caring28]

I am looking for information on our local operating rooms. I would appreciate any information you all can give me for an evidence based research project we are performing. How many of your hospital OR's have a process in place currently for dealing with a death in the OR? How many of you know what to do when a sudden death occurs? Would you know who to call? How many deaths does your OR see per year? Are you a trauma center or a community hospital? Do you know where to find resources to deal with this natural process? Thank you in advance for your input!

[jessrene, LPN]

We do have a process in place, have not used it in the two years I have been here. Small community hospital with a resource policy book on shelf by coordinator's desk that lists procedure.

[Rose_Queen, BSN, MSN, RN]

We have an entire 2" binder dedicated to patient deaths in the OR. There's a checklist of what needs done in what order, who to call, papers to fill out, that sort of thing. We have maybe 1-3 deaths in the OR per year. A lot of our docs will do a "dead man's stitch" on patients that are actively coding, and then we get them out of the OR and into the unit. Usually they make it to the unit for about 15 minutes before being pronounced. Most of our deaths are either expected, such as weaning off a tandem heart that we don't expect to successfully wean or ruptured AAAs, or fatal injuries from trauma that no one expected to leave the OR anyway. Not counting harvests as OR deaths, since technically they were pronounced prior to OR.