Getting better at BPs on seniors

[fm_emt]

Wow. This weekend was crazy. $EVENT at $LOCAL_UNIVERSITY and there were a few thousand people there. The weather wound up being pretty hot, and as Murphy's Law would have it, we ended up being understaffed and busy as all hell.

Old people were dropping like FLIES.

Here's the problem: I was having a hell of a time getting a blood pressure on the older folks. Heat related issues, and a few of them had VERY weak or non-existent radial pulses. Palpating a BP worked on one - barely. The others? Ugh. I tried several times and couldn't get an accurate BP. The steth head was right over the brachial artery (I made damn sure of that) but for the life of me, I couldn't get a decent BP reading.

Any suggestions? Things I could try next time I run into such a situation? On one of the patients, her BP ended up being 62/41 according to the FD's electronic cuff. (We ended up calling FD out for one of the more serious patients)

I'm open to suggestions. Anything. I felt pretty silly not being able to get an accurate blood pressure from the senior citizens. :|

 

[MMiz]

I worked a big 'ole multi-day cancer walk, and we had a lot of heat related issues. At the end of the event it was an oven, and all of the walkers' parents (old folks) came out to cheer.

We ended up declaring an MCI and several EMS units from our competitors and surrounding agencies had to respond.

Getting a BP under the circumstances is difficult. Was it noisy? When I can't get one, which happens, I usually palpate.

I found that the auto-cuff on our LP12 was no good under those circumstances.

 

[fm_emt]

Getting a BP under the circumstances is difficult. Was it noisy? When I can't get one, which happens, I usually palpate.

I found that the auto-cuff on our LP12 was no good under those circumstances.

It was the annual Indian Powwow - in addition to it being hot, dusty, and crowded, there was endless (loud) tribal drumming. I'm pretty sure that added a bit to the problem. We had an auto-cuff too that was no good. It was reading way off what we got manually. Probably the drums.