Acute care…critical values…etc

A fellow blogger who started out as an OT student blogger and is now an entry-level occupational therapist, writes really great OT posts that make me jealous. He doesn’t ramble or use a lot of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. This is one of my recent favorites…

http://bloggingot.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/acute-care-is-intense/

Here is an excerpt from that post since it has to do with critical values (he was talking about what he does before seeing a patient, when working in acute care), which I mentioned in an earlier post:

Lab values – The most common things I look for are hematocrit, hemoglobin, potassium, sodium, creatinine, PT/INR. Are the lab values high? low? Which way are they trending? All these are factors into whether or not a patient should be on hold. For example, if a patient has a hemoglobin of 7.5 and a hematocrit of 22.6, I would probably not see the patient, since they are below critical and are probably going to be too weak to see me anyway.

Mar 17, 2008 | Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: 1