Nurses’ Performance Regarding Patients with Cardiac Arrhythmias

Abstract

Arrhythmias are one of the most complexes and urgent problems of modern cardiology. A wide spectrum of clinical manifestations of cardiac rhythm disorders (CRDs), their detection both in various diseases and in healthy people, necessitates the study of their prevalence in populations. In the majority of conducted epidemiological studies a single recording of electrocardiogram (ECG) was used. This is the most usable method for examination of large populations (Zatonskaya, et al., 2017). Nurses play a critical role in arrhythmia identification and management at the bedside. On the basis of the nurse’s interpretation of the electrocardiographic (ECG) monitor recording, the nurse may simply gather more data, notify the physician who makes treatment decisions based on the rhythm interpretation of the nurse, or institute pharmacologic and counter shock therapies consistent with unit-specific protocols. Therefore understanding the nurse’s perception of arrhythmia knowledge, and ultimately, developing tools to evaluate this knowledge, and competence in the recognition of ECG rhythms, are of critical importance to nursing (Paul, 2011).