Date of Award

Spring 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP)

Department

Nursing

Committee Chairperson

Jackie Owens, DNP, CRNP

Abstract

Hypothermia has been associated with increased morbidity and mortality in adults and increased mortality in children. Unplanned hypothermia increases adverse outcomes in patients, including increased blood loss, increased risk for blood transfusion, decreased oxygenation to major organs, and decreased immune response (Beedle et al., 2017; Brozanski et al., 2020; Erdoğan et al., 2019; Granum et al., 2019). Collaboration with Emergency Department (ED) physician leadership, clinical educators, and trauma leadership determined the need for a formal warming procedure. The purpose of this project was to implement a clinical warming algorithm for pediatric patients within the ED who had a temperature of ≤35.9° Celsius at any point during their stay. The pre-intervention group contained 15 cases of hypothermia in the months of January, February and March, post-intervention included 12 cases in the same period of the year 2022. Statistically significant findings were not established during this quality improvement project. Clinical significance was achieved, which showed an increase in the percent of patients reaching normothermia and an increase in body temperatures on average, in those that did not reach normothermia versus the retrospective population. It is recommended to perform a longer quality improvement project with a larger sample size to achieve statistical significance.

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