Column Spotlight: Learning to Be Strip Savvy When Reading ECGs

“In my experience, many nurses working outside of critical care haven’t had a lot of training in reading and understanding basic ECGs.”

Have you ever learned something new and thought to yourself, how did I miss this? Why didn’t I know about this sooner?

Now more than ever people are finding information by searching for it on their own. The days of reading a print journal cover to cover are, for the most part, behind us. Many readers find articles by searching for a specific topic of interest. While this approach can be useful, you risk missing out on all that rich content in a journal issue you didn’t know that you needed to know.

One of AJN’s great features is our broad coverage of nursing topics.

We intentionally put together each issue to bring nurses the information they need to stay on the top of their professional game. For this reason, I like to highlight our columns here every now and then. (See, for example, my spotlight on our Nursing Research, Step by Step column).

Another great column nurses might be missing out on is Strip Savvy, written by Nicole Kupchik and Joel Green. This month’s installment, “A Case of an […]

2022-02-02T10:18:08-05:00February 2nd, 2022|Nursing|0 Comments
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Nurses Week: Comparing Notes on Matters of the Heart

By Marcy Phipps, RN, a regular contributor to this blog. Her essay, “The Love Song of Frank,” was published in the May issue of AJN.

Image courtesy of Wikemedia Commons

Earlier this week I took care of a man who nearly coded, rather unexpectedly. I was standing next to his bed when his heart rate slowed suddenly and significantly, with one extraordinarily long pause between beats.

A pause doesn’t have to be extraordinarily long to feel like it is, especially when you’re standing next to someone, palpating their pulse while watching the monitor. In this case, in this five-second pause that felt like minutes, I’d dropped the bed rail, shouted out to my team, and was ready to start chest compressions when his heart beat again. His symptomatic bradycardia was treated accordingly; there were no chest compressions, and it was no code.

I had lunch with a good nurse-friend of mine who works in a nearby hospital. I was telling her how “bradycardia with a five-second pause” feels a lot like asystole, when you’re standing next to your patient, and she was telling me that her hospital had sort of cancelled Nurses Week this year. Instead of the traditional week of silly games, superlative awards, and physician-sponsored lunches, and then a later “Hospital Week,” her facility was having a combined “Team Member Week.”

“It feels like we’ve lost recognition,” my friend said. “We don’t feel appreciated, and we’re angry.”

I definitely see […]

2016-11-21T13:10:11-05:00May 9th, 2012|career, nursing perspective|1 Comment
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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