What is a hospital resuscitation room for?

• The main purpose of the resuscitation room is to monitor the recovery from anaesthesia of recently operated patients.
• The first resuscitation rooms, although not as we know them today, date back to 1863.
• The resuscitation room can be of two types, post-anaesthesia or post-surgical critical care, and we explain everything about them in this article.

The resuscitation room is a unit directly linked to the Anaesthesia Department. Here, all patients who have undergone any type of anaesthesia are attended to, and appropriate care is provided to ensure that they are able to return to their room as soon as possible and in the best possible condition.

The resuscitation room is not only used for patients recovering from anaesthesia or critical post-operative patients, but also for paediatric patients, outpatients and emergency patients, among others.

Post-surgical critical patients and patients requiring anaesthesia for procedures outside the operating theatre area are also cared for.

The resuscitation room is also known as the awakening room; within it, the healthcare staff must be very close and work as a team, as it is necessary to cover all the needs of the patient, and for this it is necessary for the staff to be properly coordinated. 

In addition, it is essential that staff follow the relevant rules and protocols.

The recovery room (RR) is usually located in an area close to the operating theatre, so that patients can be transferred quickly.

The ultimate purpose of the recovery room is to keep the patient under close surveillance until they are safely ready to go to their room or home.

When a patient arrives in the recovery room, pulse, blood pressure and respiratory rate should be checked every 15 minutes for the first hour.

While anaesthesiology has been with us for many years, the same cannot be said for the resuscitation room.

The first resuscitation rooms, at least in their primitive form, were set up in the 19th century, being a room next to the operating theatre for patients to recover a little from anaesthesia before going home.

The concept of the resuscitation room already existed at that time, but it was not until 1949 that the New York operating theatre safety committee established that such a room was absolutely necessary.

From then on, resuscitation rooms began to be installed in every hospital in the city, and gradually across the country, until they are found in virtually every hospital in the world today.

The first resuscitation rooms were very rudimentary compared to what we have today, but the concept back then is the same as it is today. The primary objective was and is to care for the patient until he or she recovers from the anaesthesia and can go to his or her room or home in optimal safety conditions.

The resuscitation room can be of two different types, depending on the type of patients in the room and the type of care that needs to be provided. Basically, we distinguish between a post-anaesthesia recovery unit and a post-surgical critical care unit:

• Post-anaesthesia recovery unit: This resuscitation room, also called the "Awakening Room", has the primary objective of being the optimal place in which the patient can recover from the effects of anaesthesia, stabilise vital signs, recognise possible complications and relieve pain.
• Post-surgical critical care unit: This is the post-operative resuscitation unit, where the treatment and recovery of altered functions is carried out and where intensive care is provided for possible critical destabilisation.

There is no set length of time in the recovery room; each patient, depending on his or her situation and the speed of recovery, will spend different lengths of time in the recovery room. A patient cannot be discharged until he or she is fully prepared, as it is much easier to take action in the recovery room in case of possible complications.

The patient must meet a number of criteria in order to be discharged by the doctor in charge of the recovery room. As a minimum, the patient must be conscious and oriented and have stable vital signs for the last hour. Pain from the operation must be controlled and under no circumstances should the patient have received opioids in the last half hour.

A very common technique used to determine whether or not to discharge a patient from the resuscitation room is the Aldrete test, which consists of a general assessment of the patient, in which the patient's activity, breathing, circulation, colouring and consciousness are checked.

If the patient is in an optimal condition to leave the resuscitation room, he/she can go to his/her room or even home if he/she is fully recovered.