Safe practices for bed bathing in the intensive care unit: validation of a checklist.
Juliana Cristina Silva, Márcia Marques Dos Santos Felix, Rosa Helena Aparecida Gonçalves and 3 others
PMID 38088689WHAT IT FOUND
Nurses can use a 41-item checklist to observe ICU bed baths: 54 procedures showed excellent agreement between two nurses.
It is a tool for checking ICU bed baths, but it does not prove bed bathing improves patient outcomes.
Key findings
01The final 41-item checklist was used to observe 54 bed bath procedures in critically ill patients, and two ICU nurses showed excellent agreement.
02Item-level agreement was generally high, with agreement beyond chance from 0.462 to 0.962 and proportions of agreement from 72.22% to 100%.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
It was done in one Brazilian ICU during the pandemic, so it may not apply to other units. It measured agreement between nurses using the checklist, not whether following the checklist prevented infections, falls, or device disconnections. One observer was a master's student and researcher involved in developing the checklist. The checklist has not been tested in a larger sample or in routine long-term use.
Declared interests
The authors report CNPq support for a Research Productivity Grant to Barbosa MH. No other conflicts of interest are stated.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that using this checklist has been shown to reduce infections, falls, or device disconnections in ICU patients. The paper validates how consistently two nurses score bed-bath practices; it did not test patient outcomes.