The use of sedation to promote patient comfort and safety within the intensive care unit (ICU) is a foundation of critical care practice. As such, sedation-related practice guidelines are routinely evaluated and refined. It is widely accepted that heavy sedation of critically ill patients should be limited to specific circumstances (eg, intracranial hypertension and severe respiratory failure), and instead, providers should target light sedation in most cases. Notable ambiguity persists concerning the definition of light sedation; however, a widely accepted definition describes light sedation as using a sedative dose that allows the patient to respond to 3 simple commands (eg, open eyes, squeeze hand, stick out tongue). The 2 most-used measures of sedation (and agitation) are the Sedation-Agitation Scale (SAS) and the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS). However, scholars and clinicians have proposed various thresholds for light sedation that differ from those proposed by the developers of the SAS and RASS....

You do not currently have access to this content.