telemetry

Telemetry is monitoring patients' heart rhythms and rates with remote equipment. The patient is hooked up to heavy small portable "tele-units" and the monitors broadcast the information to monitors at the nurses station.

If you look up in the ceilings of tele units you'll see X or + sign shaped "antenna" that are the broadcast equipment. This is the reason why you mustn't use a cell phone on these floors -- the cell phone interferes with the broadcast equipment.

Ahhhhhh. So the nurse monitors those machines and gives basic care to those patients with heart problems??? Is there a specific nurse to monitor those machines, or do all nurses do that? I mean - is that a specialty thing, or a basic nursing skill?

Think of "TELE-vision" when you want to remember TELEmetry. We see both on screens(one is heart activity and the other is, well, TV)

Reading and interpreting telemetry is definitely a specialty skill. We have classes that we send nurses to who are going to be working on the tele units.

I worked a tele unit for about 2 years. It's as others have said. At the nurses staion there is a bank of monitors that shows their patterns for each bed. We had to run strips BID each shift and post them in the charts. We also usually had either one nurse who watched them or a tele tech, since all the nurses can't just sit at the station and watch them every minute.

Usually a tele floor will be a step down type unit from a CCU. We would have patients having procedures like cardiac caths, abalations etc. Seemed like almost every patient was on dopamine, dobutamine,(on renal doses) heparin etc. You get lots of CHFers, cardiac myopathies....You usually are trained to read strips and must know your cardiac meds well. Codes are fairly common. Must know how quick to push what meds, what can be mixed, and so on.

My floor had limits on the doses of certain meds like dobutamine and dopamine. Exceed that limit and they need to go to CCU/ICU. And one needed to remind the mds frequently about this.

I enjoyed the work.