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- Title
Vital Signs of Class I Surgical Patients.
- Authors
Davis, Marcia Jane; Nomura, Lucy Ann
- Abstract
A patient's vital signs are good indicators of patient stability. A nurse may sense that a life-threatening change has occurred; a change in vital signs documents the reality. As postoperative patients recover from the stresses of anesthesia and surgery, nurses assess them frequently, in accord with the individual hospital's protocol, and the task regularly performed in this assessment is the taking of vital signs. As staff nurses on medical-surgical units, we have observed that patients who are in good physical condition preoperatively tend to have few problems in their postoperative period on the unit. Therefore, we have wondered whether the frequency with which nurses assess these patients was appropriate to their needs. Hence the purpose of this study was to examine this question, particularly in relation to patients who are in Class I of the physical classification system used by the American Society of Anesthesiologists (Dripps, Eckenhoff, & Vandam, 1982). To our knowledge, the literature contains no studies that establish the appropriate frequency of assessing postoperative patients or of one group of these patients versus other groups.
- Subjects
VITAL signs; PATIENTS; SURGERY
- Publication
Western Journal of Nursing Research, 1990, Vol 12, Issue 1, p28
- ISSN
0193-9459
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/019394599001200103