Genitourinary Assessment
How much urine output a patient has tells you about a variety of different things. The causes of low urine output could be because of acute kidney injury, low blood pressure, infection, and ureter obstruction among other causes. If a patient's urine output has decreased, once again ask yourself, "Why?"
Some basics in your assessment include asking the following: Does the patient have a Foley catheter in place? If so, what is their urine output? If not, then when did they last urinate? Any pain with urination? What does the urine look like?
A basic assessment might go something like this: The patient became more unstable and the doctor asked me to place a Foley catheter to monitor urine output. I placed a 16 French Foley with a 10 mL balloon with no difficulty. She has had 500 mL of cloudy amber urine out in the last six hours. I notified the doctor that the urine was cloudy and I sent a urinalysis to the lab to see if she had a urinary tract infection (UTI). The results came back that she does have a UTI so the doctor placed her on antibiotics.
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