Guidelines in Practice: Pneumatic Tourniquet Safety

Establishing a safe environment for every perioperative patient, including those undergoing procedures that involve pneumatic tourniquet use, is essential to achieving positive outcomes. The recently updated AORN "Guideline for pneumatic tourniquet safety" provides perioperative team members with evidence-based recommendations on how to safely care for patients when using a pneumatic tourniquet. This article provides an overview of the guideline and discusses recommendations for performing a preoperative assessment, selecting and inflating tourniquets, monitoring the tourniquet during inflation, deflating tourniquets, and developing and implementing monitoring and reporting protocols as an integral component of the quality assurance program. A scenario related to the use of these processes focuses on calculating the limb occlusion pressure using an arterial occlusion pressure estimation formula. Perioperative nurses should review the guideline in its entirety and apply the recommendations to support the safe use of pneumatic tourniquets in the perioperative environment.