Background and Goal of Study:
The increase of anaesthetic procedures in limited bed hospitals force the physicians to be more efficient in perioperative length stay. One of the main problems to reduce the hospitalization is the discharge delay due to the lack of spontaneous diuresis in short stay postoperative units (SSPU).
The goal of study is the implementation of a protocol based on bladder volume estimation with echography obtains better outcomes and reduce the discharge delay.
Material and Methods:
After the study Ethical approval, our Engineering Department developed a software to estimate the bladder volume using an image obtained with a conventional convex ultrasound transducer (Image1). This software has been validated with healthy volunteers.
This observational study compares the common abdominal palpation for bladder examination (Control group (CG)) against the ultrasound evaluation ( Protocol Group (PG)) . The population for this study are 40 patients aged between 18 and 70, ASA I-II without any urinary disorder and with a length of stay in SSPU from 1 to 3 hours.
The team designed a protocol (Table 1) to study the patient before using and urinary catheter, to detect any urinary postoperative disorder like oliguria, which lack of diagnosis can cause an acute renal failure, or urinary retention that may cause bradycardia or hypotension.
All nurses from SSPU had been taught on how to proceed with the protocol and how perform the bladder echography.
Results and Discussion:
Although there is no hospitalization discharge reduction (p>0'05) the protocol let us improve our patients urinary monitorization in SSPU, increasing the spontaneous diuresis, avoiding urinary retention and detecting patients that may suffer oliguria (p<0’05) . More fluids were needed in SSPU to treat the patients in the PG (p<0’05) and there was not an increase of urinary catheterisation.
Conclusion(s):
It is possible to improve our patient attention optimizing the use of the SSPU resources, like designing protocols and teaching nurses on how to use the echography technique.
Further studies are required to demonstrate the real impact of our protocol implementation.

02 / UTILITY OF BLADDER UTRASOUND STUDY DUE TO MONITOR POSTOPERATIVE DIURESIS IN NON-CATHETERISED PATIENTS. PROTOCOL IMPLEMENTATION.