 Welcome to Nursing School Explained and the Care Plan Help Series. This video specifically focuses on lab tests as well as nursing considerations and how you can tie those two together on a care plan because that's what your professors are looking for to make sure that you can understand the theoretical knowledge and then apply it to your patient scenario in clinical. Today, we're going to specifically look at red blood cells and hemoglobin and hematocrit. Now these three can always be grouped together because they correlate. Red blood cells being the oxygen carrying capacity, hematocrit is the percentage of red blood cells of the whole blood, and then hemoglobin is that molecule that carries the oxygen on the red blood cells. So when one is low, all the other ones are low and when they're all high, they're all high. So we can group them all together. So when we think about red blood cells, we have to think, like I said, oxygen carrying capacity as well as volume, so blood volume. So if there's blood loss, then the patient is going to show signs and symptoms of hyperbolemia. And in our vital signs, the way this is going to manifest itself is by an elevated heart rate and a blood pressure. So we always start by assessing our vital signs and these are things that we need to keep an eye out for. And we'll start with what we can assess and then with possible interventions. And of course, we're going to take a look at the patient's skin color and also their eyes to see are there any skin color changes that are they do, they look particularly pale. The inside of the mouth, their mucus membranes, we can also check those. And please be sure to consider your patient's ethnicity and skin color when it comes to that because different ethnicities have different signs when it comes to that and review that. And then we always wanna, when we worry about red blood cells, we always wanna think about bleeding. So any signs and symptoms of bleeding, such in the stool, the gum, so any kind of surgical sites or wounds, for example. Then we wanna also consider any past medical history that patient has that causes low red blood cells. So this can be anything that has to do with kidney failure, maybe some sort of underlying GI or autoimmune disorder such as Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. So patients with underlying conditions might already be predisposed to having low red blood cells and low H&H. So we'll have to tie this in together in our analysis and then see what was the patient's baseline before this lab value resulted to see is it actually low or is it just trending normal for this particular patient? And then meds. We always wanna see and link this into NSAIDs because NSAIDs can cause GI bleeds, especially if used in high doses or for prolonged period of time. And so we wanna assess their medications also to see if that can link into a possibly low red blood cell and H&H count. And then so I've come up with a very simple examples to apply this. So the example is a 45-year-old female who has status post-cholestectomy with the past medical history of diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and she's a smoker. So always following the nursing process, we're gonna assess all these things first and we're gonna analyze it and make it personalized or individualized for this patient given this case scenario. So now if the patient showed signs and symptoms of hyperlipidemia, we would wanna administer IV fluids, possibly consider a blood transfusion if the H&H is low enough and then encourage iron-rich foods to kind of boost the patient's iron stores because that's one of the most common reasons that patients can be anemic. That's more chronically rather than acute. And then when we detect any signs of bleeding then we need to investigate a little bit further and see what's going on with the surgical sites, for example, or investigate into the stool, see if there's any potential for gastritis, stomach ulcers, diverticulitis, anything like that. And so that's kind of like how you tie it all together and keep in mind this is very personalized to the patient that's in front of you. So you really need to use your critical thinking to tie those pieces together. And this is a very simple example, but hopefully that has given you a little bit of a baseline on the foundation to understand how to analyze these care plans, get good grades and foster that critical thinking. Check out the other videos in the upcoming weeks regarding other lab results and what nursing considerations to watch out for. And thanks for watching. See you soon.