Blood pressures

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Just a quick question..

What does your facility do for stable residents on Blood pressure medications. Are you doing them daily, twice daily, weekly? I ask because I worked at another facilty the other night and out of 20 residents, 18 were blood pressures twice daily. Looking over their blood pressures listed for the month, they were all very stable except for two resident. Just wanted some info from other LTC nurses

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I don't work in LTC, but we do have swing bed patients on my floor. Sometimes vitals are ordered once daily, some once per shift. I usually check their BP before I give them though. If the patients were at home (which the LTC is supposed to BE their home), they wouldn't be checking their BP every 8 hours.

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Well we have our skilled residents and we do complete assessments on them every shift. But our regular LTC residents we don't. Some have specific orders for BP/pulse and parameters, but many don't

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I'm not much help then, LOL! Working as an aide 8 1/2 years ago, we had to do VS on every resident Q shift (and this was LTC). I have no idea what meds they were on as I was only an aide and it was also so long ago, but that was something we did.

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Specializes in Critical Care; LTC.

In my institution if we have stable blood pressures we do them weekly. If a resident isn't on any blood pressure medicine we do them monthly. If the blood pressures aren't stable then we keep the hold parameters with each dose. hope this helps

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I am a student right now and I just had 7 weeks at a LTC facility and all their residents were on weekly BP's that I had seen. I am sure that if the resident had unstable BP's that they were probably doing them daily or q shift.

Hope that helps you out :)

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Specializes in LTC, Memory loss, PDN.

Weekly, unless ordered otherwise or one of the weeklies is not WNL. I see a lot of CNAs take VS in LTC and for the most part I don't have a problem with it. What really urks me is when nurses have CNAs stop what they're doing in order to get a stat VS. If it's that urgent the nurse needs to obtain it.

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Where I worked in LTC - the nurses did the v/s.

We had alot of cardiac meds so we had frequent checks.

Not that easy since we had one BP machine for 2 nurses and 45 residents

That does not work well

In addition the only machine was rarely recalibrated - cost $$$ despite frequent requests r/t bizarre readings,

We used wrist cuff pressure or another cvs bp devices

These were not legal but more effective and faster than the equipment provided.

Our management did not have a background in geriactrics. All of them had a background in Hospital ED and critical care and seemed to think we should be doing vitals q/shift

When we had an admit each shift for 7 days did full vitals and ssesment.With our faulty equipment. no matter the diagnosis.Then we have the falls and more V/S neuro, UTI and URI and more V/s Of course bed b gets her bp done and bed A wants hers done too....

auuurrhhh

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Specializes in LTC, ER, ICU, Psych, Med-surg...etc....

When a resident is stable on blood pressure medications it is crazy to do them more than once a week...I would even talk to the doctor about bi-weekly or monthly. As has already been mentioned, if the person were at home, they would not be taking their blood pressure except once a week or month, if they have the ability to do that. I think a lot of times the skilled residents get daily blood pressures, but they require a different type of monitoring due to their "skilling factors" than does a long term resident. Also you set yourself up for documentation issues if you have an order for blood pressures every shift and they are not being done.

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