Patient's Vital Signs

1227 Words3 Pages

Introduction
Vital signs are an important factor in the nursing process. Nurses every day assess a patient’s vital signs every hour, sometimes even every fifteen minutes depending on the situation. These vital signs include: heart rate, respirations, blood pressure, and temperature. Today, nurses also treat pain as the fifth vital sign because of its importance to the nursing process as a whole. Pain is an undesirable side effect that arises from many disease processes and surgical procedures. It is not the same to every person that experiences it. Many things can affect how a patient perceives their own pain. Some aspects that alter a patient’s way of perceiving pain are culture, past experiences with pain, age, gender, and the ability to …show more content…

There were sixty-three patients that were included in this study. Thirty-five of those patients responded in the final questionnaire at the conclusion of the study and all thought that massage therapy was effective in helping to reduce stress (Drackley 121). Of those thirty-five, thirty-four of them believed that massage therapy was useful in reducing stress and twenty-nine of the thirty-five felt that it was extremely effective in reducing fatigue, creating a general feeling of wellness, improved their sleep quality, and also improved their ability to think more clearly (Drackley 121). Through the use of massage therapy with these women, there was an improvement in the patients’ lives. Even the nurses realized that the use of massage therapy did not disrupt any of the patients’ care plans and that the patients in fact actually enjoyed the option of being able to receive massages (Drackley 123). With the patients being more comfortable and happy, the nurse is happier to from not having to deal with grumpy postoperative patients. The main limitation in this study was the small sample size. There were only sixty-three patients that were able to participate in the study in the Mayo Clinic Breast Clinic located in Rochester, MN. However, through the patients who responded back in the final questionnaire, showed the positive aspects that massage therapy brought to their postoperative

Open Document