"Ice, Ice… Maybe? Not on My Dental Table!"

Patients undergoing dental or oral surgery are known for suffering from hypothermia for numerous reasons.
Hypothermia brings with it many negative effects including:

• Increased oxygen requirements, by 40% when shivering
• Prolonged recoveries
• Painful to shiver after surgery
• Reduces MAC requirements, by 5% for every 1c dropped
• Overdose more likely
• Will not respond to anticholinergics
• Blood viscosity increases
• Arrhythmias with nonresponsive bradycardia
• Delayed wound healing
• Increase infection rates
• Death

All patients can suffer from hypothermia, so we must be pre-emptive in how we try to prevent this from occurring. This session will cover multiple ideas as to how we can avoid this, or indeed treat it, if hypothermia occurs.
We will also cover what to be careful of when ‘heating’ patients, and the important of avoiding hyperthermia, which, yes can happen when we implement good patient warming and hypothermia prevention!