N, M Lichtwarck-Aschoff, H Forst Klinikum Augsburg, Germany Critical Care 2007, 11(Suppl 2):P136 (doi: 10.1186/cc5296)

N, M Lichtwarck-Aschoff, H Forst Klinikum Augsburg, Germany Critical Care 2007, 11(Suppl 2):P136 (doi: 10.1186/cc5296) Introduction Glycaemic control is another example of protocoldriven therapy in intensive care medicine to improve outcome in critically ill patients. While the advantage of this approach seems to be obvious, little is known about the problems of implementing such a protocol. The intention of this study was to evaluate problems of implementation and to develop strategies to overcome them. Setting A 16-bed surgical ICU of a university teaching hospital with 50 critical care nurses, about 30 in part-time employment. Method Over a 7-month period all patients staying longer than 48 hours in the ICU with hyperglycaemia (>150 mg ) on three consecutive measurements were included in the study. These patients were treated according to a protocol at the discretion of the attending nurse. On daily rounds PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20800871 and every 4? weeks supervision was performed, and the protocol was modified three times during this period according to staff comments. Further on, medical as well as nonmedical problems of implementation were analysed and discussed. Attitudes and perceived impeding aspects of the implementation process were recorded by means of a questionnaire. Results Since insulin sensitivity showed enormous variability, glycaemic control required a high nursing effort. Impeding aspects to titrate blood glucose into the target range were the absence of a nutritional protocol (high carbohydrate intake, despite inflammation/infection leading to hyperglycaemia that was difficult toP135 Intensive insulin therapy and indications for intensive care admissionA Sanusi1, I Welters2, A Shenkin2, P Turner3, B Perry2 MedChemExpress BGB-3111 1University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria; 2University of Liverpool, UK; 3The Royal Liverpool Hospital, Liverpool, UK Critical Care 2007, 11(Suppl 2):P135 (doi: 10.1186/cc5295) Introduction Insulin resistance and hyperglycemia are common in critically ill patients, and are associated with higher morbidity and mortality in these patients if not controlled. Intensive insulin therapy has been shown to reduce morbidity and mortality. It is not clear, however, whether the patients’ indication for admission into the ICU is related to the time to achieve glycaemic control or the total dose of insulin required. This study was designed to audit theSAvailable online http://ccforum.com/supplements/11/Scontrol) and fear of hypoglycaemia (<60 mg ) leading to low-dose insulin with consecutive hyperglycaemia. Lack of communication (and therefore a loss of information) between critical care nurses and the intensivists and poor acceptance from physicians to leave this field of intensive care medicine to the nurses were additional factors that slowed the implementation process. Conclusion Implementation of protocol-driven medicine requires a high quality of information flow. The lack of linearity between blood glucose and insulin dose (variability of insulin sensitivity) required a sometimes intuitive (experienced) decision to titrate the insulin dose. The conflict of physicians with this new role of critical care nurses might be due to the lack of understanding of the evolution of the nursing profession.P138 Evaluation of a model predictive control algorithm using time-variant sampling to establish tight glycaemic control in clinical practiceC Pachler1, J Plank1, H Weinhandl1, R Hovorka2, L Chassin2, P Kaufmann1, KH Smolle1, TR Pieber1, M Ellmerer1 1Medical Unive.