Npo After Midnight Essay

1459 Words3 Pages

Often heard in the healthcare setting, the phrase “NPO after midnight” is familiar to most any nurse that has had a patient preparing to undergo a surgical or invasive procedure. An abbreviation of the Latin “nil per os,” meaning nothing by mouth, the phrase is usually part of a practitioner’s order set designed to protect the patient from complications of aspiration while under the effects of anesthesia. However, as most any nurse with these experiences also knows, these orders are not without a cost to the patient. A patient waking up on the morning of surgery arises to the their body calling out for breakfast and something to drink, but going without due to fasting orders in place. Add this to existing anxiety about undergoing the procedure …show more content…

This lead to wide variability in how such orders were implemented. The authors of this study gathered data from sixty nurses and thirty surgeons in a surgical clinic regarding how long patients from various age groups were kept fasting from various types of food (clear liquids, particulate liquids, solid foods, and fatty/greasy solid foods). The study found that less than half of the participants in the study (43.8%) kept patients strictly NPO after midnight pre-operatively. Another 34.2% discontinued all oral intake eight hours before surgery, with the same percentage choosing to stop liquid intake four to eight hours prior. Clearly, the lack of an institutionalized protocol for pre-operative fasting creates greater risk for patient harm. Improving patient outcomes in the peri-operative period when it comes to fasting can definitely be improved in terms of patient satisfaction, but should never be at the expense of safety, which starts with agreement, consensus and standardization. It might have been interesting to have the authors of this study note incidences of aspiration during surgery among the patients of this entity, given the variance of

Open Document