Management of a patient with chest drainage

The learner should be able to:

• Prepare the different elements of a chest drainage system
• Monitor a chest tube
• Recognize a non-functional drain
• Recognize an excluded drain
• Recognize a complication of a chest tube: infection, displacement of the drain.

A slender young man who presents to the emergency for right basic thoracic pain appeared during an effort owing to breathing difficulty. The called doctor finds silence on auscultation of the right pneumothorax and indicates an X-ray that shows a right pneumothorax