Interpreting telemetry

[Mrs_Orangutan]

Hi all,

First I'd like to thank you all for this great site! It's been so helpful!

I'm a foreign educated nurse and preparing for NCLEX-RN. While practicing I got this awful telemetry question and I haven't been preparing for them at all..

My question is, do you study a lot of ekg interpretation and telemetry in nursing school in US? Could you give me some idea how to prepare for it, how to study etc. I know how VF looks like but these calculations are all new to me.. yikes!

Ok here's the question...

"The nurse is interpreting a client's telemetry strip. If the QT interval is 0.52 second and the R-R interval is 1.72 seconds, how many seconds is the QTc interval (the QT interval corrected for the heart rate)?"

I've got the rationale and the answer but it still doesn't make any sense.. It doesn't look like an entry level question to me.

Can you really get these kind of questions on the test?

Thanks in advance!

[caliotter3]

I would not waste a lot of time on this one type of question. If you have time to delve into relearning this info, fine, if not, concentrate on other areas. You can't learn it all unless you have a photographic memory to begin with.

[Mrs_Orangutan]

Great, thank you for answering!

[sockov, ADN, ASN, BSN, CNA, LVN]

I have never seen a question about the QTc on the NCLEX-RN. That is more on a critical care test.