DNP Nurse Anesthesia Faculty and Students Participate in Inaugural International Consensus Meeting in Germany

DNP Nurse Anesthesia Faculty and Students Participate in Inaugural International Consensus Meeting in Germany

DUSON Nurse Anesthesia faculty members and students recently participated in the inaugural international consensus meeting sponsored by GE Healthcare in Frankfurt, Germany to develop and promulgate best-practice recommendations for mechanically ventilating patients in the operating room setting. 

Christopher Young, MD, Duke Department of Anesthesia, served as the expert panel president and organizer of the meeting. Erica Harris, MSN, CRNA, Duke Department of Anesthesia, served as the only nurse anesthetist member of the expert panel. The remaining expert panel members were physician anesthesiologists from, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Canada and the U.S. 

Harris and Young have been collaborating with engineers at GE Healthcare for two years to exploit existing anesthesia machine ventilator capabilities and develop new hardware and software applications to maximize the anesthesia provider’s ability to apply methods to protect the lungs from the well-known detrimental physiologic effects that accompany mechanical ventilation in the operating room. This collaboration was the genesis of discussions regarding “Lung Protective Ventilation” strategies amongst the group of U.S. and international experts. These discussions led to a list of twenty-four questions that the group determined were important to address in order to make general recommendations to the anesthesia community regarding how to approach the goal of lung protective ventilation in the operating room. The process to address these questions began with an extensive literature search performed by four students from the Duke University School of Nursing, Nurse Anesthesia Program Class of 2020 and two staff CRNAs from the Duke University Medical Center, Department of Anesthesia. The student participants included Stephan Bodnar, Brittany Trethewey, Jaclyn Migliarese and Brooks Bukowy. The CRNAs were Chad Ragains and Ryland Elliot. 

The researchers were assisted by Amanda Woodward, MLIS, Duke Research and Education Librarian and liaison to the School of Nursing. The researchers attended the meeting in Frankfurt and were responsible for providing literature supported background to the expert panel members during their deliberations to determine the best clinical practice recommendation for each of the twenty-four questions. Chuck Vacchiano, PhD, CRNA, FAAN, faculty member of the School of Nursing, Nurse Anesthesia Program, monitored the research process, coordinated the organization of the results of the literature searches and served as the Frankfurt meeting moderator. The deliverables from this meeting were a set of perioperative lung protective ventilation suggestions and recommendations to be disseminated to the international anesthesia community by way of a peer-reviewed publication for which all the Duke participants will be coauthors.  

 

 

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