Monitoring: key issues discussed

One questioned the way that monitors are used today and the other focused on recently published guidelines for the use of capnography in the ICU. SUZANNE CALLANDER reports.

Dr Max Jonas, consultant intensivist at Southampton Hospitals University Trust, opened proceedings at this year’s Completing the Picture, an annual educational symposium for clinical and biomedical engineers, sponsored by Welch Allyn. He gave the audience some food for thought on the use of monitors in healthcare, questioning the usefulness of these well-used pieces of health technology and where their real benefits lie. “A monitor is a piece of equipment designed to warn us about something,” he began. “To be effective, monitoring really needs to be a continuous process and it needs to be able to quickly notify the heathcare team of change and enable easy interpretation of what these changes mean in terms of clinical management. “My view is that we need to move monitoring from being a ‘warning’ device to being a ‘performing’ device. With trainees and junior doctors, nurses and other healthcare staff all using the equipment, we need a new generation of monitors that can do more than simply ‘warn’. They need to be able to explain to the user what is actually happening.” Dr Jonas stressed the importance of continuous monitoring and explained why he feels it is so important. He said: “It is important that monitoring should be continuous because only then are we watching the patient at all times and, importantly, are able to see the effects of a treatment in real-time. With intermittent monitoring the possibility of missing something important is too great i.e. the patient may have left in between measurements!

A team process