Swan-Ganz Catheter Unboxing! Life Saving Medical Tool for Heart Attacks
Channel: Nurse Howie
Date: 2021-06-15

What makes a cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU) special? In the beginning, ventilators made the ICU (intensive care unit) the main place for patients to go to that were very sick (near death). But then more and more people started dying of heart attacks and other cardiac-related disorders! It was devastating because no one could measure the status of the patient's heart, its pump strength, and cardiac output (amount of volume of blood pumped per minute), and people just kept dying. 

In response, Dr. Swan and Dr. Ganz created a tool--a catheter--that could be "snaked" into the right heart in order to indirectly determine the cardiac output from the ventricle of the left heart. People started getting better as treatment options began to adapt based on these numbers! But the invention was not without its criticisms, however, and studies started to accuse the catheter of having little to no success in improving patient outcomes (the rate at which patients were surviving the ICU). 

Supporters of the Swan-Ganz catheter clapped back saying that the studies weren't fair because the patients that needed the catheter were very sick anyways so that was not a good barometer for its success and subsequent indication for use. They also said that clinicians need to be able to master the use of the catheter in order to actually make it useful for the patient. 

Which is why I made this video: in order to learn more about heart problems and take care of very sick patients we need to learn more about Swan-Ganz catheter so we can know what to do. We need to know the parts of it and how it works so we can be SAFE and do the very BEST for our patients! 

I hope you enjoy! Come with me and watch the video. There are time stamps, and follow my social media for more. Also don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell so you can get instant notification of more great videos. :)

Timestamp:
0:00 Intro


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