EVALUATING THE APPLICATION OF SAFE SUCTION CRITERIA BY NURSES WORKING IN INTENSIVE CARE UNIT IN URMIA

Suction is considered as an essential process to keep the trache tube open for patients under mecanical ventilation.Howevereit has detrimental side effects such as Hypoxy,Bradycardy, etc. The ideal suction is the one which is secure and brings about little pain. In order to reduce its side effects, nurses are to be well-trained since they are mostly responsible to take care of patients.

Materials & Methods :

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to show whether safe suction criteria are taken into consideration by nurses in intensive care unit or not.

Method: In this study, nursing care regarding trachealsuction which were conducted by 31 nurses were gone under direct observation and were recorded in a checklist.The data were based on central tendancy and Chi square Test and were analyzed by SPSS 16.

Result : This study yield the following findings out of total participants related to hand washing befor tracheal suction, 80% got the minimum score and 16% got the maximum score. With respect to trache tube suction, 83/9% score the lowest score and 3/2% score the highest one. Regarding the nasal suction, 83/2 % score the lowest score on the other hand only 16/2% score the highest score. There was no important correlation between safe suction and job experince, and between job experience in intensive care unit and age.

Conclusion: This study shows that nursing care related to tracheal suction in intensive care unit are not safe and there is an essential need to carefully identify the causes and to eliminate them to prevent the side effects.