After this session you’ll be able to:

1. Identify areas of your hospital at risk for malignant hyperthermia.
2. Create a malignant hyperthermia intervention process specific to your hospital needs and resources.
3. Develop a plan to conduct mock drills to measure the effectiveness of your malignant hyperthermia process in any hospital area.

Why this is important:

Malignant hyperthermia (MH) is a well-known life-threatening crisis in surgical services that has recently received much more attention. While anesthesia gases may not be used outside of surgical services, succinylcholine is used in many areas for rapid sequence intubation. MH is often the farthest thing from the mind of physicians and nurses in these settings. Education, drills, and preprocedure screening help keep surgical services team members keenly aware of this risk.

The MH SWAT Team from UnityPoint Health Des Moines will share the successes, challenges, and continuing improvement efforts of the Malignant Hyperthermia Alert process at their facility. Use their lessons learned to develop drills and education that will enable members of your surgical services department to recognize MH in patients and respond quickly.