 Welcome to nursing school explained and this video in the new series of care plan help particularly how lab values and your patient need to be correlated. So care plans are this very nice opportunity for you to show that you understand and critically think and link the theoretical knowledge and the patient that's in front of you in clinical and see how that all relates. So this particular video will focus on lab values specifically white blood cell count and nursing considerations. So here white blood cells when we have white blood cells on the result for our patient we should always think about potential infection or inflammation. So don't jump to the conclusion that the patient has an infection there might be some other things going on but there are certain things that we can do for our patient to assess their vital signs and their white blood cell status and keep an eye on maybe trending up of those white blood cells. So vital signs that relate to inflammation and infection are always temperature right your temperature is going to go up and then it might also reflect in the heart rate and the blood pressure meaning the patient would be tachycardic and potentially hypotensive. We'll go into the purple here in a little bit. Then complications that arise from hospitalization always include think about the lungs and the urine because patients might develop some sort of adelectasis or even a pneumonia and or urinary tract infections. So we always want to assess the lung sounds and their urine and that doesn't necessarily mean a urine sample we can just gather subjective data how's your urination any burning any changing color and so forth and then we want to check any kind of surgical sites or wounds and that includes drains and maybe burn injuries any kind of skin breakdown that could be the cause for this underlying inflammation and infection. We always want to check other pertinent sites so look at the admission data and see what else the patient might be at risk for giving their past medical history and then think about any potential complications of the diagnosis and the main problem that the patient is there for. So anybody whose bed bound is at risk like I said for lung complications and urine complications but if there are underlying condition that has to do with their kidney so their liver or anything else any immuno compromise we want to specifically tie that into the patient's analysis and so then over here I came up with an example very simple example of a patient of 45 year old female who is status post-colossus tectomy so she had her gall bladder removed past medical history includes diabetes hyperlipidemia and she's a smoker. So now when we think about those white cells we can assess their vital signs like we already talked about and then interventions over here are in purple so we can give her antipyretics to get that fever down we can also give her IV fluids to keep her hydrated get the heart rate down and the blood pressure up we can encourage the use of an incentive spirometer and or maybe check a urine analysis if that's indicated for any surgical sites after we assess them we want to check for dressing changes and any wound care that we might need to be providing and then if we think about any potential complications so in this patient who is also a diabetic post-surgery we know that hospitalizations cause stress response and so the surgery so we want to keep a close eye on the patient's blood sugar see how much she's eating note the percentage of the meals and then give her insulin to keep that blood sugar down to make sure that she can heal properly. So these are all tied into the patient's white count first we assess and then we intervene and if you can show this relationship on your care plan your your instructor will be very happy with you and you'll get a good grade plus it'll foster your critical thinking. Thanks for watching check the other videos that pertain to lab values and nursing considerations on your care plans coming up in the next few weeks thanks for watching