Oversedation Zero as a tool for comfort, safety and intensive care unit management

Sedation is necessary in the management of critically ill patients, both to alleviate suffering and to cure patients with diseases that require admission to the intensive care unit. Such sedation should be appropriate to the patient needs at each timepoint during clinical evolution, and neither too low (undersedation) nor too high (oversedation). Adequate sedation influences patient comfort, safety, survival, subsequent quality of life, bed rotation of critical care units and costs. Undersedation is detected and quickly corrected. In contrast, oversedation is silent and difficult to prevent in the absence of management guidelines, collective awareness and teamwork. The Zero Oversedation Project of the Sedation, Analgesia and Delirium Working Group of the Spanish Society of Intensive and Critical Care Medicine and Coronary Units aims to offer a practical teaching and collective awareness tool for ensuring patient comfort, safety and management with a view to optimizing the clinical outcomes and minimizing the deleterious effects of excessive sedation. The tool is based on a package of measures that include monitoring pain, analgesia, agitation, sedation, delirium and neuromuscular block, keeping patients pain-free, performing dynamic sedation according to clinical objectives, agreeing upon the multidisciplinary protocol to be followed, and avoiding deep sedation where not clinically indicated.