Benefits of Oral Care (Nursing)

00:00 I'd like to take a moment to talk about providing oral care to your patients. I cannot emphasize enough how important this simple skill is. So first of all, good oral care is going to help prevent pneumonia in your clients. It's going to assist with eating and nutrition for your patients with healing and not to mention just client comfort. So this is going to be particularly important in your stroke clients for example; ICU clients, those in the intensive care unit; debilitated clients; and just routine care overall. So here is a story for you I like to share. So as a nurse, I work on a stroke unit and as you know sometimes they have trouble swallowing or providing their own personal care. I came in on my shift, assess my patient, I found hardened mucus on the top and scabbed over their upper palate of their mouth.

00:57 Now this particular patient had a hard time swallowing. As you can imagine, all of that hardened top he couldn't even feel his upper palate to swallow appropriately. So I had to provide really diligent, really diligent oral care. I even had to take tweezers and try to get some of that off. I'm not trying to gross you out, but you can imagine how absolutely uncomfortable and how big of an issue that was for that client. So that's why we really want to emphasize providing oral care to our patients.