Cardiac Monitoring Service: Do Cardiac Trained Rns Make A Difference?

Cardiac monitoring is a very critical medical practice in the sense that it does help a great deal in tracking all the activities of the human heart and relaying the pertinent data to the relevant cardiologists for the purposes of subsequent interpretation and relevant actions.

These monitoring services may be undertaken by various health care practitioners among them being ordinary nurses, clinical officers, and registered nurses, among others. In the proceeding discourse, the following fundamental question is going to be discussed in details, “Cardiac Monitoring Service: Do Cardiac Trained RNs Make a Difference?”

To begin with, cardiac-trained registered nurses are basically advanced trained nurses who have graduated from a college’s nursing program or from a nursing school and have also passed a national licensing exam. Unlike ordinary registered nurses, they specialize exclusively on cardiology and other heart-related nursing specialties.

Some of the most popular courses that persons intending to qualify as cardiac-trained registered nurses ought to pursue include the following: Master of Science Nursing, Cardiac Care Concentration; Master of Science Nursing, Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Cardiac Specialty program; Master of Science Nursing, Cardiovascular Health and Disease Management; and Master of Science Nursing, Acute Care Nurse Practitioner, Cardiovascular Specialization.

They work alongside cardiologists to provide cardiovascular treatments to patients that have acute or chronic heart diseases.

Their preference over and above ordinary registered nurses as well as other health care practitioners for the purposes of cardiac monitoring is by all means necessary owing to the following reasons:

cardiac-monitoring

Education:

As has already been alluded to, cardiac-trained registered nurses are specifically trained to handle issues related to the heart. Their training is ordinarily largely modeled around the heart and heart alone. A typical cardiac-trained registered nurse must possess graduate-level degree training in nursing with a specialty in cardiology and must in most cases proceed to pursue a post-Masters certificate in a respective cardiovascular specialty. These requirements place them at a very significant advantage over and above all the other healthcare practitioners insofar as their suitability for the cardiac monitoring roles are concerned. Consequently, they are better-placed to offer a higher quality of services as compared to ordinary registered nurses or other categories of healthcare practitioners.
Expertise:
Besides quality training, they must also possess other crucial qualifications before being registered with the relevant statutory bodies. The typical cardiac-trained registered nurse must demonstrate the following and indeed many more other competencies: the ability to manage hypertension, arrhythmias, and congestive heart failures; the ability to monitor and evaluate heart devices like defibrillators and pacemakers; ability to perform various cardiac tests, exercise stress tests, stress echo-cardiograms, stress tests, CT coronary angiograms, and Positron Emission Tomography/dipyridamole stress tests; ability to provide physical exams in order to diagnose chronic as well as other acute cardiac diseases; ability to interpret laboratory results and cardiac tests; the ability to prescribe and manage cardiac medications and other therapies; as well as the ability to educate patients on health maintenance and disease prevention, among others. For these reasons, they are much more qualified to offer very high-quality services.

Experience:
There is a direct correlation between experience levels on the one hand, and efficacy in service delivery on the other hand. Cardiac-trained registered nurses have a higher level of academic qualification, (for one to qualify as a cardiac registered nurse, he must master’s level of training in nursing). They must also have worked for some time before being eligible to be conferred the relevant cardiovascular nursing certification. As things stand, evidence of at least 1,750 hours of nursing care for the acutely or critically ill adult patients for two years before the application for certification have to be produced. 875 hours of which must have been accrued within 12 months prior to the application whereas the remaining 875 hours of which must have been in the care of cardiac surgery patients within the first 48 hours of post-surgery. These stringent requirements mean that the cardiac-trained registered nurses inevitably possess more work experience and are hence better-placed to provide a higher quality of services as compared to ordinary registered nurses and other healthcare practitioners.

Versatility:
Even though cardiac-trained registered nurses are primarily stationed in hospital cardiology units, they also find relevance and suitability in other settings beside hospitals. They may be employed in cardiovascular interventional units, cardiac catheterization laboratories, telemetry care centers, electrophysiology laboratories, and cardiothoracic surgical units. From the employer’s perspective, the hiring of such persons confers greatly reduced costs of running the business/healthcare facility and greater returns of value invested. From the patient’s perspective, this translates into greater penetration of the cardiac monitoring services in the sense that such practitioners may be accessed in a wide range of outlets.

Scope:
By the nature of their training, specialization, skills, and work experience, the cardiac-trained registered nurses are able to perform a wide range of tasks that are related to heart care and other related issues. They do take care of patients of various backgrounds such as newborn babies, the extremely elderly, and the terminally ill; diagnose, manage, and treat conditions that do affect the complex cardiovascular systems; promote optimal cardiovascular health among patients through preventative measures which involve health counseling, stress tests, and screening as well as disease prevention and management strategies; provide care to patients suffering from coronary heart diseases and by providing post-operative care to those who are recovering from bypass surgery or heart transplants, among other roles. This again confers added benefits to the patients and the healthcare providers alike. To the healthcare providers, the hiring of such persons confers greatly reduced costs of running the business/healthcare facility and greater returns of value invested. To the patients, this translates into greater penetration of the cardiac monitoring services in the sense that such practitioners may be accessed in a wide range of outlets.

Conclusion:
It is very evident from the foregoing discourse that cardiac-trained registered nurses are by all means the way to go for any cardiac monitoring initiatives. It is only through their employment and utilization that a number of errors and discrepancies that may naturally arise in the course of the acquisition and transmission of the relevant pieces of data may be avoided altogether. What’s more? In order to build long-term trust between the respective healthcare facility and the general public, qualified workforce is by all means vital, of which the cardiac-trained registered nurses are the most outstanding and necessary.

 

Author Bio:
Sathya Kumar is the Founder & CEO at Techindia Infoway Pvt Ltd., Chennai. Techindia is Asia’s largest provider of healthcare management solutions for exceptional remote healthcare diagnostics and patient monitoring, with a proven track of high performance for highly regulated healthcare industries and for the patients globally.