Why a Patient with a Tracheostomy Cannot Talk?
Tracheostomy Patient Communication:
Nurses play a vital role in providing excellent nursing care to tracheostomy patients. This type of patient needs individual support and attention from a health care provider. Nurses are giving effective and skilled nursing care to the patient day by day. Tracheostomy care has become a routine part of both the acute and long term care units. When nurses are giving care to the patient, they frequently face the question, why tracheostomy patient cannot talk? But they do not know the answer. This article has presented its actual reason.
What is Tracheostomy?
Tracheostomy is an operative procedure that makes an incision in the anterior aspect of the neck and opens a surgical airway through an incision in the trachea.
It is usually performed in those patients who could not wean off from ventilator followed by chronic lung disease, coma, diaphragm dysfunction, cancer in the neck, injury in the larynx or chest wall, vocal cord paralysis, or catastrophic neurological problems.
Why Tracheostomy Patient Voiceless?
Our speech actually begins from the diaphragm. It helps to push air from the lung into the voice box. Our voice comes from the air that we exhale. When we inhale, the diaphragm lowers and the rib cage extends, keep up air into the lungs. Then when we exhale air, create an airstream in the trachea and vibrate the vocal cord s. The vibration of the vocal cord produces the sound that lips, tongue, and teeth make a speech.
Tracheostomy is a surgically opening of the airway in the trachea. The tube lies just below the level of the vocal cord with a small secured cuff (balloon). After tracheostomy keeps the cuff inflates. The inflated cuff helps to keeps the tube in the right place and deliver proper breath by machine. Inflated balloons do not allow air to pass through the vocal cord and no air can vibrate over the vocal cord. so that for this situation tracheostomy patients cannot talk.
Maria Khatun Mona is a Founder and Editor of Nursing Exercise Blog. She is a Nursing and Midwifery Expert. Currently she is working as a Registered Nurse at Evercare Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has great passion in writing different articles on Nursing and Midwifery. Mail her at “maria.mona023@gmail.com”