Monday, September 13, 2010

How many Automated External Defibrillators are at your place of work?

Our Industrial Fire Brigade just added 10 more AEDs to our site. By my rough calculations this means we have 1 AED for every 150 employees and 1 AED for every 80,000 sqft of floor space (we have almost 2 million sqft). To put this in perspective, the recommendations generally are for 1 AED per 100,000-150,000 sqft or building floor. We now have an AED and emergency responders within 2 minutes of every employee on site!

The Philips HeartStart FRx is a great first responder AED as this author has learned through personal experience.
How does your place of work stack up? Do you need help with corporate/management buy-in? Perhaps our site's successes can help you out. Let me know!

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

12-Lead ECG: What Is It?

While cleaning up my office to put in a reading chair, I found the following 12-Lead ECGs from my clinical time.  I apologize for the poor quality of the first one, but it is a copy of a copy (of probably a copy). I have limited information on the patients for each of them somewhere in my clinical binder, but I haven't found those yet.
ECG 1

ECG 2

What do these two 12-Leads show?

Do you agree with the computerized statements?

Update on ECG 1 (16 Sept 2010)


The patient's lab values include a K+ of 2.1 mEq/L. What are some of the expected ECG changes in hypokalemia? Does this ECG show a classical or atypical presentation of hypokalemia?