| Surgical
Specialties |
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Post-Anesthesia Care Units |
Although there are accounts of a type of surgical recovery
room at an English infirmary in the 1750s, modern surgical
recovery units weren't innovated until the WWII era, when
a shortage of nurses caused hospital managers to rethink systems
for deploying workers.
Florence Nightingale in 1859 wrote of the need to separate
"casualty cases" from the general nursing ward patients.
This recovery room concept wasn't implemented until the use
of ether as an anesthetic created the need for special nursing
units for post-anesthesia patients. The actual emergence of
dedicated recovery rooms began in the 1940s.
Early recovery rooms were actually overnight special care
units before many of the duties of this type of nursing evolved
into intensive care nursing. Recovery room nursing gradually
assumed its own identity, and in 1979 a national organization
of post-anesthesia nurses began to form. In 1986 this organization,
the American Society of Post-Anesthesia Nurses, began offering
an accreditation program for post-anesthesia nurses. Recovery
rooms later became know as post-anesthesia care units, or
PACUs.
The duties of recovery room nurses in the early days were
relatively few and simple. The nurses roused anesthetized
patients, recorded their vital signs, and attempted to provide
pain relief. But as the practice of post-anesthesia care evolved,
the nurse became proficient in the use of high-tech patient
monitoring equipment, and learned to intervene to stabilize
patients experiencing respiratory and cardiovascular difficulties.
Post-anesthesia nurses are now trained in Advanced Cardiac
Life Support and care for post-operative patients of all ages.
The essence of a post-anesthesia nurse's job is the care
of surgical patients who are emerging from anesthesia. Once
surgical patients are stabilized, they are transported to
appropriate nursing units or discharged. Because they deal
with anesthetized patients, the post-anesthesia nurse must
be skilled in patient assessment. They must rely on objective
data gained through monitoring and observation, while taking
into account the patient's medical history.
CMMC's Post-Anesthesia Care Unit staff cares for 20 to 30
patients per day, and the average post-anesthesia stay for
each patient is about 60 minutes. About 60 percent of the
patients are Same-Day Surgery patients who are discharged
the same day they have surgery.
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