Blood Pressure Measurement and Other Tall Tales

From the elderly patient who really doesn’t want to get prescribed antihypertensives to the young, motivated paramedic, sometimes the numbers just don’t add up.  Check out the podcast to get the whole story!

Show Notes

Reasons a measurement may be inaccurate

• • Room Temperature
  • Exercise
  • Alcohol use
  • Nicotine use
  • Background Noise
  • Arm position
  • Muscle Tension
  • Bladder Distension
  • Talking
  • Cell phone use
  • Observer bias
  • Observer inexperience

What is Blood Pressure?

• The force or pressure exerted on the walls of the arteries by blood as it is pumped by the heart.
• Heart Contracting- Systolic BP
• Heart Relaxing- Diastolic BP
• NIBP= Non-invasive Blood Pressure
  • With external cuff
• NIBP is really just an educated guess of BP
• Pulse Pressure= SBP-DBP
• MAP= Mean Arterial Pressure
  • The Mean (average) pressure during one complete cardiac cycle
  • MAP= (CO x SVR) + CVP
  • If we are using NIBP:
    • MAP= SBP+ (DBP x 2) / 3

Automated BP Measurement

NIBP Tips from Physio-Control

Learn to Auscultate Blood Pressure

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References