Essay On Ventilator Associated Pneumonia

The relationship between the use of oral care and the occurrence of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) in critical care patients is very intriguing to me. Since I have started nursing school, I have always had an interest in the trauma area of nursing. In my medical-surgical clinical rotation, I had the opportunity to spend the day working alongside a nurse in the emergency room. Emergency and trauma nursing have always been of interest to me, even before I started nursing school. I ended up enjoying my day in the emergency room and I realized that I wanted to start working in the hospital because I loved it. I got a job working on the cardiovascular, cardiothoracic, and genitourinary surgery floor at St. Louis University Hospital (SLUH). …show more content…
I know that being on a ventilator increases one’s chance of acquiring ventilator-associated pneumonia. I also know that there have been some nursing interventions put into place to help reduce VAP in our ICU patients. One of those interventions is to raise the head of the bed, another one is frequent turning, and also oral suctioning. I could only imagine that routine oral care would be an intervention that should be used along with the other interventions to help reduce pneumonia. Although these interventions are supposed to be implemented in practice, I have rarely seen my patients on mechanical ventilation have their head of the bed raised and I have never seen oral care performed on the ICU patients. I picked this topic because I want to learn more about the relationship between performing oral care and the number of occurrences with VAP. I wanted to learn and gain further knowledge about how using superior oral care with Chlorhexidine Gluconate (CHG) can help prevent VAP in ICU patients. I also wanted to learn about why this is not being implemented in practice if it has been proven to be effective in reducing the incidence number of VAP in ICU