cfallat

Thank you so much for your reply and offer to help. My husband is a nurse and works with LVADs occasionally on a cardiac step down unit and has told me the same info about the BP and doppler. Their hospital has a LVAD team that can be there to troubleshoot in 5 minutes. I would feel so much better if I could hear from someone in the dialysis community that is doing this on an outpatient basis. Will be trying the American Nephrology Nurses' Association message board but I'm very grateful for your comments and the info provided by all here.

I can understand your concern. There has been talk of us having a LVAD patient come to our unit as well. We are a hospital based outpatient hemodialysis unit but our hospital does not have an LVAD program. I appreciate the information offered here and I've read the comments that people lead active lives on LVADs but, as other people on this message board have expressed, my concern is that we are causing fluid shifts over 3 to 4 hours in our patients and no one in our hospital has any experience with care of patients on hemodialysis with an LVAD. I would appreciate hearing from any hemodialysis nurses in the community (as opposed to the hospital) who are dialyzing patients with LVADS in outpatient hemodialysis units. Do you assign a tech or nurse to the patient? Does the nurse covering the LVAD patient take as many patients as those nurses not caring for the LVAD patient? Do you have any special equipment to monitor MAP during the treatment? We've had our first inservice on LVADs, but it would be helpful to hear from someone who's actually delivered hemodialysis care to the LVAD patient in an outpatient unit and hear their experience and what special accomodations their unit has made to ensure safe care of an LVAD patient.