ECG stickers during surgery

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Who puts ECG stickers during surgery?? Is it a nurses job, anesthesiologists or the surgeon ??????? Whats the norm in your hospital????????

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Why all the question marks? Surely it's not that big a deal to you. Patients usually get a preop EKG and the stickers may be left on. If that's what's bothering you just peel them off postop.

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Depends on the procedure... conscious sedation with a nurse monitoring, or general anesthesia.?

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On the other hand, if you're asking because you don't know if that's part of your job, yes, it probably is.

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General anesthesia...in operating room.

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General anesthesia ..in operating room.

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Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.

Usually it's a team effort. If the anesthesia provider does it, great. If the circulator does it, great. If the extra set of hands who came in to help does it, great. What matters is that it gets done.

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Specializes in Surgical, quality,management.

All of this will be explained when you start your job and orientation. Relax!

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Given that you are asking I will assume that someone has chewed your tail for not applying the EKG pads. Having worked in the OR I can tell that in my opinion it saves no time to have this done in advance and often takes longer as the easiest way to apply them particularly on a patient with large breasts is to put the stickers on with the leads already attached. Also a lot of anesthesia providers are pedantic regarding the exact placement and this changes based on the prep and drape demanded by the individual surgeon- and yes this can be different for exactly the same surgery when done by different providers, which meant we often ended up moving the pre placed pads.

My advise to you is if the people you work with consider it a step in "your" pre op duties just go ahead and slap them on and move on with your day. People like this will always find something to complain about it's best not to allow yourself to be drawn into an argument over something so petty.

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Specializes in PACU, pre/postoperative, ortho.

Where I am, pre-op places the electrodes as we print out a strip to document a baseline before surgery. We have guidelines on proper placement in order to keep them out of the surgical field depending on the procedure. The leads are left attached & sent with the pt so anesthesia just needs to plug them in.

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