One of the most nerve-wracking aspects of your job as a nurse, physician or other health care provider is the fact that you will be called on regularly to save lives. No matter how well you are trained and how easily you understood and passed your ACLS training, this is still a serious situation that [...]
One of the stickiest issues as you deal with V-fib is knowing when you should defibrillate the patient and when you should continue with CPR. CPR is obviously necessary for perfusing the brain and the heart muscle, but defibrillation is vital for getting the heart back into a rhythm through which it can perfuse the [...]
Cardiac arrest, which is what occurs when the heart stops pumping rhythmically and your patient no longer has a pulse, can be difficult to predict. Therefore, it’s often called sudden cardiac arrest, or SCA. However, as a trained health care professional, you should always be prepared for unexpected events such as this and should guard [...]
The American Heart Association comes out with a new version of their guidelines for BLS and ACLS every five years. Changes to the guidelines are designed to reflect current research and care standards with an emphasis put on the ultimate survival of every patient. The most recent set of guidelines came out in 2015, and [...]
When you hear the words EMT and paramedic, you might immediately think of those people who hop out of the backs of ambulances to help individuals in emergency situations. However, an EMT is actually different from a paramedic. While both may occasionally do some of the same tasks, one has a bit more education, training, [...]
Have you ever been part of a code where everything seemed to be spiraling out of control? Perhaps everyone was shouting something different, no one had the materials and medications that were needed and you had no idea what you were supposed to be doing. While this may be the reality in some situations, a [...]
If you are like many nurses, you may be looking for a way to advance your career or get into a new field in nursing to breathe new life into your career. If you work in a large enough hospital, one option that may be easily open to you is a transition into critical care [...]
It can be scary to take an Advanced Cardiac Life Support class for the first time. You may feel totally out of your element and may feel as if you know less than any of the others around you. While these feelings of low confidence are normal, you can do some things yourself to improve [...]
When you are helping patients in a health care facility, medications become an integral part of many of your treatments. This is especially true in the case of life-threatening conditions when code blues are called. As you study your algorithms in preparation for your ACLS certification or renewal, you’ll quickly find that the following medications [...]
A myocardial infarction, commonly called a heart attack, occurs when blood flow to a part of the heart is blocked. This is a health care emergency because, without fast repair, part of the heart muscle can completely die. In turn, this leads to long-term problems, such as congestive heart failure. In fact, in some severe [...]
© 2025 Project Heartbeat | All Rights Reserved
Oakland Campus: 333 Hegenberger Rd #855, Oakland, CA 94621
Sacramento Campus: 2033 Howe Ave Suite #150, Sacramento, CA 95825
(510) 452-1100
