Fallstricke des monitorings auf der intensivstation

Abstract

Development and introduction of differentiated monitoring technologies was one of the major steps to establish modern intensive care medicine. The necessity to rely more and more on this technology makes clinicians depend on these electronic patient-obervers. This leads to a growing uncritical use of monitoring parameters that seem to describe our patient's situation in an objective way. This article points out common pitfalls in monitoring on intensive care units. Such pitfalls may, among others, appear due to wrong measuring, methodical errors, incorrect interpretation of parameters or may appear due to unexpected external influences on the monitor signals. Nevertheless all the mentioned potential pitfalls have two things in common: first they may undermine all efforts towards the health of our patients, second the best way to avoid these pitfalls is the clinical approach to the patient. Thus, the ideal solution for all monitoring-pitfalls is the attentive clinical observation.