Biblioteca Virtual en Salud Enfermería

Hypothermia is one of the main events and consequently nursing diagnoses found in patients undergoing anesthetic-surgical procedures. The consequences caused by hypothermia directly interfere with the individual's recovery after the surgical anesthetic procedure, which can cause an increase in cardiac and respiratory morbidity, an increase in the rate of infections and an increase in the hospital stay. It aimed to evaluate the patient's warm-up using the Forced Air Heating System, during the post-anesthetic recovery period. The method used was a clinical trial, randomized-controlled, without blinding, following the recommendations of the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials, carried out from August to October 2020, in a large, public Municipal Hospital in the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. The sample consisted of 66 patients, 33 belonging to the Control Group (standard care of the Institution) and 33 to the Experimental Group (heating intervention by Forced Air Heating System), allocated by systematic probabilistic sampling technique, associated with random sampling simple. Data were collected with sociodemographic, clinical, surgical aspects and parameters evaluated in the post-anesthetic recovery period. The research project followed all ethical principles and was submitted to the Brazilian Registry of Clinical Trials. The Chi-square test, Fisher's exact test, Mann-Whitney test and the Generalized Equations Estimating method were used. The software used in the analyzes was R (version 4.0.2). The results demonstrate that the patient heating as a forced air system was not efficient and did not reestablish the normothermic state, but other benefits related to the heating were evidenced. The mean temperature of the patients at the exit of the post-anesthetic recovery room was higher for the experimental group (35.78ºC) than for the control group (35.60ºC), but this difference was not significant (p = 0.274); the experimental group shows a higher mean time of permanence in the post-anesthetic recovery room (96.97 minutes) than the control group (82.67 minutes) (p = 0.011); the mean body temperature of the patient's entry into the post-anesthetic recovery room was higher in patients in the control group (34.91ºC) than in the experimental group (34.57ºC), this difference being significant (p = 0.003); the mean difference in body temperature in and out of the post-anesthetic recovery room was higher in the experimental group (1.21ºC) than in the control group (0.69ºC); the control group patients present a higher mean systolic blood pressure in the 15 minutes (p = 0.043) and 90 minutes (p = 0.007) of anesthetic recovery and more episodes of hypertension and hypotension (p <0.001) than the patients in the experimental group; the patients of the control group present more episodes of mild and moderate hypoxemia (p <0.001) than the patients of the experimental group; and only the patients in the experimental group presented reports of improvement in the sensation of cold and tremors.