Background/Objective:Inefficient nursing care of chest drains may associated with unacceptable and sometimes life-threatening complications. This report aims to ascertain the level of knowledge of care of chest drains among nurses working in wards in a teaching hospital in Nigeria.Methods:A cross-sectional study among nurses at teaching hospital using pretested self-administered questionnaires.Results:The majority were respondents aged between 31 and 40 years (45.4%) and those who have nursing experience between 6 and 10 years. Only 37 respondents (26.2%) had a good knowledge of nursing care of chest drains. Knowledge was relatively higher among nurses who cared for chest drains daily, nurses who have a work experience of <10 years, low-rank nurses and those working in the female medical ward; however, the relationship cant (P > 0.05). Performance was poor on the questions on position of drainage system were not statistically significant with relationship to waist level while mobilizing the patient, application of suction to chest drains, daily changing of dressing over chest drain insertion site, milking of tubes and drainage system with dependent loop.Conclusion:The knowledge of care of chest drains among nurses is poor, especially in the key post procedural care. There is an urgent need to train them so as to improve the nursing care of patients managed with chest drains.

Systemic air embolism is known to rarely complicate blunt chest trauma. However, cerebral infarction caused by air emboli possibly originating from a traumatic pneumatocele has not been previously reported. We report a case of a 46-year-old woman who sustained blunt chest trauma with multiple rib and clavicular fractures, hemothorax and a huge, tense traumatic pneumatocele. She subsequently developed clinical and radiologic features of cerebral infarction. The cerebral infarct is likely to be secondary to cerebral air embolism originating from a traumatic pneumatocele.

Intrathoracic tumours in patients with Von Recklinghausen's disease have been widely reported, but there are very few cases of reported intrathoracic giant benign neurofibroma with marked mediastinal shift and superior vena cava syndrome. Patients that present with this pathology should be adequately investigated. Surgical resection has been considered curative.

The treatment of pain after thoracic surgery is a challenge and takes place in the individual clinics mostly according to clinic internal standards. It exists no currently valid S3 guideline for the treatment of acute perioperative and posttraumatic pain. For an effective pain treatment as well individual pain experience as the pain intensity of the various thoracic surgical procedures must be considered. Regular pain assessment with appropriate methods and their documentation form the basis for adequate and adapted pain therapy.There are a number of different pain therapy methods, non-medicamentous and drug-based methods, whose effectiveness is described in the literature partially different. For the treatment of acute postoperative pain after thoracic surgery, mainly drug-related procedures are used, except for physiotherapy as a non-medicamentous method. Increasingly, alternative procedures for the peridural catheter as a therapeutic gold standard in the treatment of pain after thoracic surgery are used. Their application can be integrated into a therapeutic algorithm.

Not all solitary pulmonary nodules in patients with preceding malignant formations are metastases. In order to define their nature more precisely they should be resected by video-assisted thoracoscopy, if possible. In benign lesions video-assisted thoracoscopic resection is the definitive medical procedure too.