Tag Archives: philosophy

Why Is NPO The Default Diet For Trauma Patients?

I’ve watched it happen for years. A trauma patient is admitted with a small subarachnoid hemorrhage in the evening. The residents put in all the “usual” orders and tuck them away for the night. I am the rounder the next day, and when I saunter into the patient’s room, this is what I find:

They were made NPO. And this isn’t just an issue for patients with a small head bleed. A grade II spleen. An orbital fracture. Cervical spine injury. The list goes on.

What do these injuries have to do with your GI tract?

Here are some pointers on writing the correct diet orders on your trauma patients:

  • Is there a plan to take them to the operating room within the next 8 hours or so? If not, let them eat. If you are not sure, contact the responsible service and ask. Once you have confirmed their OR status, write the appropriate order.
  • Have they just come out of the operating room from a laparotomy? Then yes, they will have an ileus and should be NPO.
  • Are they being admitted to the ICU? If their condition is tenuous enough that they need ICU level monitoring, then they actually do belong to that small group of patients that should be kept NPO.

But here’s the biggest offender. Most trauma professionals don’t think this one through, and reflexively write for the starvation diet.

  • Do they have a condition that will likely require an emergent operation in the very near future? This one is a judgment call. But how often have you seen a patient with subarachnoid hemorrhage have an emergent craniotomy? How often do low grade solid organ injuries fail if they’ve always had stable vital signs? Or even high grade injuries? The answer is, not often at all! So let them eat!

Bottom line: Unless your patient is known to be heading to the OR soon, or just had a laparotomy, the default trauma diet should be a regular diet! 

Nurses: Stop The Insanity! What To Do When The Doc Won’t Listen

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

– Albert Einstein

This post applies specifically to nurses. I know it’s happened to you. Your patient is having a problem. You do a little troubleshooting, but you feel that a doctor needs to know and possibly take some action. So you page them and duly note it in the medical record. No response. You do it again, and document it. No response. And a third time, with the same result.

And now what? Call someone else? Give up and hope the patient improves?

What if the doctor on call is a known asshole? Are you even reluctant to call in the first place? Do you delay as long as you possibly can?

Believe it or not, I’ve seen many chart review cases over the years where this situation does arise. And every once in a while, the patient actually dies. Sometimes this is directly related to the lack of intervention, but sometimes it just sets the ball rolling that eventually leads to patient demise days or weeks later.

What’s the answer? We all want to provide the best care possible for our patients. But sometimes social factors (or pager malfunctions) just get in the way. Here’s how to deal with it.

Every hospital / nursing unit needs to have a procedure for escalating patient care calls to more advanced providers. When one of your patients develops a problem, you usually have a pretty good idea of what the possible solutions are. So call/page the proper person (PA/NP/MD) who can provide that solution. If they don’t give you the “right answer”, then question it. They are not all-knowing.

If they give you a good explanation, go with it, but keep your eye on your patient’s progress. If they can’t explain why they are giving you the wrong answer, suggest they check with someone more senior. And if they don’t want to, let them know that you will have to. Consider no answer the same as a wrong answer.

Don’t stop going up the chain of command until you get that right answer, or an explanation that satisfies you. The hard part here is going up the chain. You may not be comfortable with this. But you do have resources that can help you that have more authority (nurse manager, supervisor, etc). If they, too, are uncomfortable, then your hospital has much bigger problems (unhealthy workplace). 

Example: trauma unit nurses at my hospital will call the first year resident first, then escalate to the junior and/or chief residents. If they don’t do the right thing, the in-house trauma attending gets the call. If they don’t handle it, then the trauma medical director (me) gets called. And, of course, I always do the right thing (chuckle). And our nurses know that the surgeons support them completely, since this facilitates the best patient care. The residents and PAs are educated about this chain of command when they first start on the trauma service, and it makes them more likely to choose the “right answer” since they know the buck may not stop with them.

The August Trauma MedEd Newsletter Is Coming Soon: The Laws of Trauma

I’m going to send out the next edition of the Trauma MedEd newsletter early next week. In this one, I’ll be presenting and discussing some of the “Laws of Trauma” that I’ve observed over the years. I think you’ll find them interesting and amusing.

As always, this issue will go to all of my subscribers first. If you are not yet one of them, click this link to sign up and/or download back issues.

Unfortunately, non-subscribers will have to wait until I release the issue on this blog, about 10 days later. So sign up now!

Don’t Just Read The Abstract: CT Scanning The Unstable Patient

I’ve said it many times before: “don’t just read the abstract.” They can be misleading, and doing so makes it impossible to see the shortcomings of the research model and the veracity of the conclusions. Yet good trauma professionals do it all the time.

So I’ve selected a recent poster child to demonstrate this tenet. Let’s go over the study details:

This paper is a retrospective, registry review from Japan. The authors point out that one of the long-held rules is to avoid scanning unstable trauma patients in the “tunnel of death.” The authors cite a prior study that did not show an increase in mortality from this practice. So they decided to repeat/confirm it using 11 years of national registry data.

They included all patients who arrived at the trauma center with blood pressure < 90. Interestingly, they excluded patients in frank or near arrest. And finally, patients with critical data points missing were excluded. They used a regression method to control for covariates such as age, ISS, and vitals upon arrival.

Here are the factoids:

  • Out of nearly 200,000 patients, about 7,000 were initially eligible. About 1,000 were excluded by the criteria above or because they were treated at a low volume facility. Only 5,809 were included in the study and another 500 were excluded because of missing covariates.
  • The authors found that there were significantly fewer deaths in the group of unstable patients taken to CT (20 fewer per 100 patients) (!!!?)
  • However, when corrected for confounders, this significant difference went away completely
  • But the authors conclusion in the abstract was: “We suggest physicians should consider CT as one of the diagnostic options even when patients are unstable.”

Bottom line: What? The study went from showing that taking an unstable patient to CT was amazing for decreasing mortality, to no different after applying more statistical methods. And since there was no difference, why not just go?

Here’s why. In-hospital and 24 hour mortality are not good indicators of anything because there are so many patient and hospital factors involved. And because it was a registry study, there was no way of knowing if the patient was hypotensive at the time they were taken to CT. They could have had a low blood pressure and responded well to resuscitation. Or they could have been normotensive on arrival and became hypotensive before CT scan. There is no way to cleanly identify the correct study group without a prospective study, or a very painstaking retrospective one.

One of the most important aspects of this study is some background info that is not stated in the paper. Surgeon involvement in initial resuscitation in Japan is not nearly as integrated as it is in the US. So if the resuscitating physicians can’t do anything about the bleeding in the ED, why not just scan them while awaiting arrival of the surgeon? If the patient crashes, was it due to the scan, or a delay in getting to the OR?

So don’t just read the abstract. If it seems to be too good to be true, it is. Or at least self-serving. Read the nitty gritty details and decide for yourself!

Next week: more on unstable patients and the CT scanner

Reference: Computed tomography during initial management and mortality among hemodynamically unstable blunt trauma patients: a nationwide retrospective cohort study. Scand J Trauma 25(1):74, 2017.

Why Did The Trauma Team Cut Off My Clothes?

The fifth highest priority taught in the ATLS course is exposure. This generally means getting the patient’s clothes off so any hidden injuries can be identified. Early in my career, I was called to see a patient who had a gunshot to the chest that had been missed because the consulting physician had neglected to cut off her bra. A small caliber wound was found under the elastic strap in her left anterior axillary line after a chest xray showed a bullet in mid-thorax.

The usual trauma activation routine is to cut off the clothes. There are several tips and tricks we use to do this quickly. And a number of commercial products are out there to make it even easier.

But do we really need to cut everyone’s clothes off? I’m not disputing the fact that it’s important to be able to examine every square inch. But do we need to destroy everything our patient is wearing? I once saw a sequined wedding dress cut off (it’s almost as bad as cutting off a down jacket).

The answer is no. The key concept here is patient safety. Can you safely remove the clothing in a less destructive way? For most victims of major blunt trauma, we worry a lot about the spine. Unfortunately, it’s just not possible to allow the patient to wriggle out of their clothes and protect their spine. The same goes for fractures; it may be too uncomfortable to remove clothing because of fracture movement so scissors are required.

Penetrating trauma is a bit different, and in many cases it’s a good idea to try to get the clothing off intact. Once again, if spinal injury is a consideration (gunshots only), the involved clothes should be cut off. A patient with a gunshot to the chest can probably have their pants safely and gently pulled off, but their shirt and coat must be cut.

The police forensic investigators like to have intact clothing, if possible. This is another good reason to try to remove clothing from penetrating injury victims without cutting.

Bottom line: Think before you cut clothes! Major blunt trauma and bad injuries require scissors. Lesser energy blunt injury may allow some pieces of clothing to be removed in the usual method. Most penetrating injury does not require cutting. But if you must (for patient safety), avoid any holes in the fabric so forensics experts can do their job.