Insight

When helping your patient breathe, it’s important to ensure they are getting enough oxygen. Sounds easy, right? It gets a little more complicated when we start thinking about the surface area doing gas exchange. To get oxygen into the blood, we need to ensure as many alveoli are open for gas exchange as possible. If enough alveoli collapse, we have less opportunity to get oxygen to the blood and hypoxia occurs.

This is where PEEP (positive end-expiratory pressure) comes in. Having positive pressure (i.e. pressure pushing into the lungs) at the end of each expiration on the ventilator makes it so that there is still air pushing hard enough to keep the alveoli open. All of the alveoli are functional, gas exchange occurs, and we don’t have to worry about a collapsed lung–everyone wins! This is especially important to keep in mind when treating ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) patients.

-Brendan Tarantino

Related Content

Now that you understand this term check out the link below to see it in the clinical context of one of our PAC learning spaces, or visit the references highlighted below for more related content.

Dive Deeper

References

• Positive End-Expiratory Pressure (PEEP) Chris Nickson, MBChB
• PEEP in 90 seconds – DOCTOR Explains Nav Badesha, MD