Postoperative Complications and Care Plan for a Patient with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Running head: NURSING ASSIGNMENT
NURSING ASSIGNMENT
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

NURSING ASSIGNMENT1
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Discussion........................................................................................................................................2
Background..................................................................................................................................2
The risk factor of the patient........................................................................................................3
One potential post-operative complication of the patient............................................................4
The care plan................................................................................................................................5
Role of physiotherapy after operation.........................................................................................7
The education that the patient requires........................................................................................7
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................8
Reference.........................................................................................................................................9

NURSING ASSIGNMENT2
Introduction
The postoperative complications are the discomforts that a patient suffers after the
surgery is over. The extent of the difficulties vary according to the operations and from persons
to persons. The complications may include nausea and vomiting due to the anaesthesia done
before surgery. The patient any suffers from sore throat because of the tube placed in the
windpipe. Another significant discomfort is restlessness and sleeplessness. Not only these side
effects, but the patient may also develop certain complications like bleeding, shock, wound
infection, deep vein thrombosis, and pulmonary embolism, problems of lungs, urinary retention
and reactions to anaesthesia. Post-operative care is the care that the patients receive after the
surgical procedure is over. During the postoperative period, the nurses have to conduct the
assessments of patients, implement specific nursing interventions to meet the needs of the
patients and preventing the patients from suffering from complications. They also help in
providing the necessary education required by the patient (Bowyer & Royse, 2016). This
assignment is going to deal with a case study for examining the potential significant
postoperative complications of a person. The job also deals with how a nurse can apply her
knowledge in developing a care plan for preventing the patient from suffering the postoperative
complications.
Discussion
Background
The case study is about a 66-year-old gentleman, Mr Joseph Bailey, who was admitted to
the surgical ward after undergoing a thoracotomy and right upper lobe lobectomy. The operation
was done for an early-stage non-small cell cancer (NSCLC). His medical history showed that he

NURSING ASSIGNMENT3
suffered from osteoarthritis and bronchitis. He only lived with his wife in an only two-story
building. His height is 160 cm, and weight is 45 kilogram. At the time of returning to the ward
from the theatre, the blood pressure was 108/56. His body temperature was 37.2° Celsius, the
respiratory rate was 18 breaths/minutes, the concentration of oxygen was 96%, and the score of
pain was 5/10. He was already using a catheter and had already trained 100 ml of urine since the
time he had returned to the ward. He was administered 0.9% saline in the left hand at the rate of
100 ml/hr. Oxygen was delivered at the rate of 21/ minutes through nasal prangs. The result of
the GCS was found to be 14.
The risk factor of the patient
The patient of the case study suffered from an early-stage non-small cell lung cancer and
had undergone thoracotomy and lobectomy in the upper lobe of the right side. The staging of
lung cancer is done based on the location of cancer and whether cancer has spread to other
organs or lymph nodes or not. Tumours can grow within the lung for an extended period before
they are found as the size of the lungs are large. Almost 85%of the lung cancer are the non-small
cell lung cancer. Among them adenocarcinoma is the most common type of lung cancer, 25% of
the lung cancers are the squamous cell carcinoma, and the large cell carcinoma counts for 10%
of NSCLC (Gazdar, Bunn & Minna, 2017). At stage I, the cancer is located within the lungs, and
it does not spread to any other regions. At phase II, cancer spreads to the lymph nodes, and in
phase III, the tumour can be found in the lymph nodes in the middle region of the chest. Stage IV
is the final stage of cancer, in which cancer had spread to both the lungs and also to other parts of
the body, like liver or another organ (Antonia et al., 2019). In the given case study, the patient
had to undergo thoracotomy and upper lobe lobectomy on the right side. The non-small cell lung
cancer of stage I and stage II can be cured by surgery, and because of this, surgery was done to