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Posts Tagged ‘blood pressure’

In today’s medical office most clinics are supplied with electronic blood pressure machines. This doesn’t always mean that you are out of the clear for taking a blood pressure. If you are working as a medical assistant taking a manual blood pressure is something that you must know. You may have a patient who doesn’t believe the electronic machine is accurate or you may have a patient whose arm is too large to fit the cuff. Below I have found this  useful tutorial to take a manual blood pressure from www.cdc.gov:

Method of Measuring Arterial Blood Pressure In the measurement procedure a cuff is wrapped around a person’s arm with an inflatable rubber bag inside the cuff centered over the brachial artery. Enough air pressure is pumped into the cuff to close the artery. Air pressure is then released by opening the thumb valve. When the pressure in the cuff is equal to the pressure on the artery, the artery opens and the blood begins to return to the part of the artery that was closed. As the blood returns to the artery, pulse sounds begin. These sounds can be heard through a stethoscope placed over the brachial pulse point. The sounds con tinue for a time while the cuff is deflated slowly, eventually becoming too faint to hear. The cuff is connected by tubing to a manometer, which shows the amount of pressure on the artery. When the first pulse sounds are heard, the reading on the manometer measures the systolic blood pressure. The last sound heard is the diastolic blood pressure. In children, the muffling of sound or fourth sound is often used as the diastolic blood pressure rather than the disappearance of sound.