Treat patient not equipment!

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Where are you going with this? Every tool is simply something we use to help us hopefully appreciate the big picture. Are we attempting to discredit pulse oximetry and capnography? I am not sure that is possible with the data at hand.

We can tell a bit about oxygenation, ventilation, metabolism, and tube placement with pulse oximetry and capnography. These; however, may not help with the other million or so things that can go wrong during a MAC.

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Specializes in Med surg, Critical Care, LTC.

Personally, I think is it common sense, treat the patient, not the monitor. Any nurse with a reasonable amount of experience can tell just by talking to a patient and observing their breathing pattern, color, whether they can speak in sentences, etc... whether or not they are having respiratory difficulty. I don't need a pulse ox to tell me that, I may get one as a baseline, but if my respiratory distress came from a fire, then the pulse ox would probably fall within the normal range - yet my patient is clearly distressed, again, treat the patient not the monitor.

No different for cardiac monitoring. If my monitor tells me the patient is in a sinus rhythm, but they are unresponsive and not breathing, I guess I better start thinking of either monitor malfunction or PEA while coding my patient.

There will unfortunately always be those who get excited and freaked out by a monitor reading, most of the time, assessing your patient will either help you to relax a bit, OR help you to conclude the monitor was right.

A computerized piece of equipment is NOT a substitute for a qualified and experienced nurse. The equipment is only as good as the nurses ability to interpret what he/she sees and assess if it correlates with their assessment of the patient.

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You can do a little experiment with the pulse ox - how long can you hold your breath before the numbers drop?

About 70 seconds here and the SpO2 actually rose a little bit before falling the two times I tried.

The capnometer has the advantage there, and so does watching the patient.

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Well, we cannot compare pulse oximetry and capnography in that way. Pulse oximetry is more of an indicator of oxygenation, while capnography is more of a measure of ventilation. Two related but different concepts.

On a side note. A healthy well oxygenated adult will take several minutes to desaturate.

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