Postoperative Nausea Vomiting: A Case Study

Postoperative Nausea Vomiting Working in the recovery room I see more often than not a significant amount of postoperative patients who suffer from nausea resulting in vomiting. As a nurse my ultimate goal for these patients is to decrease their recovery time and speed up the healing process. According to Hambridge (2013), “Post-operative nausea and vomiting is a common complication for many surgical patients, causing anxiety and distress” (p. 35). This anxiety or distress caused from nausea and vomiting may result in a delayed healing process and an increased length of stay. In the postoperative phase I usually see antiemetic therapy given after the patient has already succumb to nausea and or vomiting. For this reason my main topic will be to analyze the use of antiemetic administration prior to the postoperative period in order to reduce nausea and vomiting in the recovery phase. Through the use of prophylactically pre-medicating patients with an antiemetic before surgery I will determine if this is an effective tool in the prevention of postoperative nausea.
Charts will be audited to determine what type of antiemetic therapy was used prior to surgery and if they were nauseated postoperatively. Another idea to collect such data would be to survey the patient coming out of the operating room asking them questions directly pertaining to nausea. These would be close-ended questions and would consist of yes or no answers. Creswell (2014) recognizes the utilization of close-ended questions as part of the quantitative approach. This particular research project may shed valuable light onto the effects of preoperative prophylactic antiemetic use and thus improve patient