Category Archives: General

Crafting And Refining Your Massive Transfusion Protocol – Part 4

It’s more on the massive transfusion protocol (MTP). I’ll continue today with MTP activation triggers.

What criteria should trigger your massive transfusion protocol? Sometimes, it’s obvious. The EMS report indicates that your incoming patient is in shock. Or there was notable blood loss at the scene. Or they have a mangled extremity and will need blood products in the OR, if not sooner.

But sometimes the need for ongoing and large quantities of blood sneaks up on you. The patient is doing well but has an unexplained pressure dip. And it happens again. You give one of your  uncrossmatched units of blood. It happens again. At some point, you come to the realization that you’ve given six units of blood and no plasma or other products! Ouch!

Many trauma centers have adopted MTP criteria like:

  • More than 4 units given over 4 hours
  • More that 10 units to be given over 24 hours
  • Loss of half a blood volume over 24 hours

I call these the “psychic power” criteria, because one must surely be prescient to know this information just shortly after the patient arrives. Don’t include criteria like these at your center!

Instead use some sort of objective criteria. A simple one is the use of any of your blood refrigerator products or emergency release blood, or a calculated score such as the ABC score or shock index (SI).

ABC score is the Assessment of Blood Consumption score and gives one point each for a heart rate > 120, SBP < 90, positive FAST, penetrating mechanism.  ACS score > 2 was predictive of requiring MTP with sensitivity and specificity of about 85%. Overtriage was about 15%.

Shock index (SI) is defined as the heart rate divided by the SBP. Normal values are in the range of 0.5 to 0.7. Need for MTP was found to increase to 2x for SI of 0.9, 4x with an SI of 1.1, and 7x with SI 1.3.

One paper compared these two systems retrospectively on 645 trauma activations over a 5-year period. They found that they both worked well with the following results:

  • Shock index > 1 – 68% sensitive 81% specific
  • ABC > 2 – 47% sensitive, 90% specific

The study suggests that shock index is more sensitive, and takes less technical skill to calculate. Bottom line: just pick the some objective criterion you are most comfortable with and use it!

Reference: Accuracy of shock index versus ABC score to predict need for massive transfusion in trauma patients. Injury 49(1): 15-19, 2018

Well folks, that’s it for the MTP series! Hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to email or leave a comment with any questions or suggestions!

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Nursing Malpractice: The Basics – Part 2

What are common sources of malpractice complaints against nurses? The most common event is medication error. Most people worry about common errors like wrong dose, wrong drug, and wrong route of administration. But one less commonly considered drug-related responsibility is assessment for side effects and toxicity of medications administered.

Other common reasons include failure to adequately monitor and assess the patient, and failure to supervise a patient that results in harm. Significant changes in patient condition must be reported to the responsible physician. However, doing so does not necessarily get the nurse off the hook. If the physician’s response leads the nurse to believe that they have misdiagnosed the problem or are prescribing an incorrect drug or course of action, the nurse is obligated to follow the chain of command to notify a nursing supervisor or other physician of the event.

And finally, one of the most common issues complicating malpractice cases of any kind is documentation. Lawsuits must typically be filed within two years of the event that caused harm. Once that occurs though, several more years may pass before significant action occurs. Collection and review of documentation, identification of experts, and collection of depositions takes time. And unfortunately, our memories are imperfect after many years go by. Good documentation is paramount! “Work not documented is work not done,” I always say. And poor documentation allows attorneys to make your good work look as bad as they want and need it to.

Reference: Examining Nursing Malpractice: A Defense Attorney’s Perspective. Critical Care Nursing 23(2):104-107, 2003.

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Nursing Malpractice: The Basics – Part 1

Back in the old, old days, there was really no such thing as nursing malpractice. Nurses had little true responsibility, and liability largely fell to the treating physicians. But as nursing responsibilities have grown, they have become an integral part of the assessment, planning, and management of their patients.

As all trauma professionals know, our work is very complex. And unfortunately, our understanding of how the human body works and responds to injury is still incomplete. So, unfortunately, undesirable things happen from time to time.

But does every little adverse event or complication mean that someone is at fault? Or that they can/should be sued? Fortunately, the answer is no.

The law is complex, at least to professionals outside the legal field. Following are the basics of malpractice as it relates to nurses.

There are four elements that must be present for a malpractice case to be brought forward:

  1. The nurse must have established a nurse-patient relationship. Documentation provided by the nurse or other providers in the medical record must demonstrate that they were in some way involved in care of the patient.
  2. A scope of duty must be established within the relationship. For example, an ICU nurse will have duties relating to examining the patient, recording vital signs, reporting significant events to physicians, etc. The exact duties may vary somewhat geographically and even between individual hospitals. Written policies help to clarify some of these duties, but often, experts are required to testify to what the usual standards of care are when not covered by policy.
  3. There must be a departure from what is called “good and accepted practice.” The definition of this leaves a lot of wiggle room. It is defined as the care that an ordinarily prudent nurse would have provided in the given situation. It does not need to be the optimum or best care. And if there is more than one approved choice, a nurse is not negligent if they choose either of them, even if it later turns out to be a poorer choice.
  4. Finally, there must be a cause-effect relationship between the nurse’s action and the patient’s alleged injury. This linkage must be more than a possibility, it must be highly probable. For example, wound infections occur after a given percentage of operations, and it varies based on the wound classification. It’s a tough sell to bring suit for improper dressing care in a grossly contaminated wound that is likely to become infected anyway. Typically, expert witnesses must attest to the fact that the patient was, more likely than not, harmed by the nurse’s action or inaction.

Tune in to my next post for Part 2 of Nursing Malpractice!

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What’s The Best Chest Seal For Sucking Chest Wounds?

The treatment of a “sucking chest wound” in the field has typically been with application of some type of occlusive dressing. Many times, a generic adhesive dressing is applied, typically the same kind used to cover IV sites. This is quick, easy, cheap, and readily available in the ambulance. But there is a danger that this could result in development of tension pneumothorax, because the dressing not only keeps air from getting in but also keeps any buildup of pneumothorax from getting out.

To avoid this, a number of vented products have been developed and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These devices have some sort of system to allow drainage of accumulating air or blood, typically a one-way valve or drainage channels. They also need to stick well to a chest wall, which may have blood or other fluids that might disrupt the seal completely.

The US Army has a strong interest in making sure the products they use for this purpose work exactly as promised. The US Army Institute of Surgical Research examined 5 currently FDA-approved products to determine their ability to adhere to bleeding chest wounds, and to drain accumulating air and/or blood from the pleural space. They developed an open chest wound with active bleeding in a swine model.

An open hemopneumothorax was created by infusing air and blood, the animal was stabilized, then additional aliquots of air and blood were infused to simulate ongoing bleeding and air buildup. The image below shows the 5 products used and the animal setup:

Here are the factoids:

  • Creation of the open hemopneumothorax caused the intrapleural pressure to move toward atmospheric pressure as expected, resulting in labored breathing and reduced O2 saturation
  • Sealing the wound with any of the chest seal products corrected all of the problems just noted
  • Chest seals with one way valves did not evacuate blood efficiently (Bolin and SAM). The dressings either detached due to pooled blood, or the vent system clogged from blood clot.
  • Seals with laminar channels for drainage (see the pig picture above) allowed easy escape of blood and air
  • Success rates were 100% for Sentinel and Russell, 67% for HyFin, 25% for SAM, and 0% for Bolin

Bottom line: Prehospital providers need to be familiar with the products they use to cover open chest wounds. Totally occlusive dressings can result in development of a tension pneumothorax if there is an ongoing air leak from the lung. Vented chest seals are preferable for these injuries. Just be aware that vented seals with drainage channels perform much better than those that rely on a one-way valve.

Reference: Do vented chest seals differ in efficacy? An experimental
evaluation using a swine hemopneumothorax model. J Trauma 83(1):182-189, 2017.

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Flying Or Diving After Traumatic Pneumothorax: Part 2

In my last post, I wrote about the accepted management of and delay in flying due to traumatic pneumothorax. I republished the post because of the publication of a paper from Oregon Health Science University in Portland. The authors specifically tried to assess timing of chest tube removal and long-distance flight, and to measure the risk of pneumothorax recurrence or other complications.

The authors performed a retrospective review of a series of military patients who had sustained chest injuries that were treated with chest tubes over a 5 year period from 2008 to 2012. After tube removal and a pneumothorax-free period of at least 24 hours (by chest x-ray), the patients were then transported by air from the military theater back to the United States.

Here are the factoids:

  • Of 517 patients screened in the military trauma registry database, only 73 were available for study after applying exclusion criteria
  • Subjects were predominantly young and male, as one would expect from the injured military population, and 74% were injured by a penetrating mechanism
  • Median time that the chest tube was in place was 4 days, and median time from tube removal to flight was 2.5 days
  • All patients had post-flight documentation available for review, but only half (37) had in-flight documentation available
  • Nearly half (40%) had positive pressure ventilation in place during the flight
  • Five patients had “in-flight medical concerns” (4 were ventilated), but none were related to the pneumothorax. The four ventilated patients had ventilator issues, the non-vented patient had “self-limited discomfort without evidence of respiratory distress.”
  • None of the subjects developed a recurrent pneumothorax, either post-flight or over the following 30 days

The authors conclude that air travel after tube removal and a 24-72 hour observation period “appears safe.”

Bottom line: Not so fast! This is yet another small, retrospective study making grand claims. The study group is a very unique population: healthy, fit young men with penetrating injury. Your average civilian trauma patient is older, less healthy, and usually has a blunt mechanism with multiple rib fractures. In-flight documentation was not available in half of the cases. And a full medical team was present on the aircraft had a problem actually occurred.

Contrast this with a civilian patient on a commercial aircraft with very limited medical equipment and expertise on board. What could go wrong? I definitely do not recommend changing our practice on these patients yet based on this one paper. Until we have better guidance (more good papers) stick to the usual wait time to ensure a safe flight for your patient.

Reference: Trauma patients are safe to fly 72 hours after tube thoracostomy removal. J Trauma, published ahead of print, May 18 2018.

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