Cardiac holding room?

Indus · Aug 27, 2010

Hi Angel!

I'm a cath lab nurse. Holding areas for the Cath Lab can vary from one hospital to another. Some hospitals have a permanent staff for their Cath Lab Holding area, some places rotate their nurses. Where I work, nurses used to rotate through there on a daily basis, but it was recently changed.

Now we have 1 permanent charge nurse who always stays in the holding area. If she is extremely busy, she will also have the 'on call' RN for that day in there with her. We also try to keep 1 Rad Tech in there to help out.

The nurse(s) organize and maintain the cath lab schedule, receive the patients, check all the necessary items on the chart, enter the patient in the Cath Lab computer with all the necessary data (labs, nursing care plan(standardized), IV's, VS, etc....), checks the IV they arrive with, checks the ID band, makes sure the patient understands what he's having done, check labs/enter labs or other into the computer, etc....

If the patient is an inpatient, or a transfer, then we also start or connect IVF to an exisiting IV, check pulses, look over medications the patient received/or not, for the day, as well as the above.

If the patient is for an implant such as a PPM or ICD, we also have to shave and prep their chest, make sure the IV is on the side for the implant, start their antibiotics, place on the zoll pads, place the Bovie pad (cautery), mix the irrigation meds, pre teaching re: implant, etc.

We have a 5 room holding area, though at times we've had up to 7-8 in there...not safe! We also hold admits who are waiting for a bed, who might have had a stent placed, or an implant done.

If the person is from the CCU, then they come directly into the cath lab room, and then go directly back to the CCU post procedure. If the person is on isolation, they also do the same. We don't keep any isolation patients in the holding room at any time.

We also pull arterial and/or venous sheaths in the holding room. If we have a very heavy schedule, then we can't pull sheaths in the labs. This would hold up turn over for the next case. So the extra Rad Tech, or the extra nurse would be the one pulling sheaths. We have an older monitoring system in the holding room, but it works ok...we monitor the patients needing to spend some time in there as protocol (i.e. Q15 mins VS post sedation,etc)

Hope this helps!

Indus