How to Check the Pulse for CPR

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Alv Rios and I am a Paramedic with Lansing Mercy Ambulance on behalf of Expert Village. In this clip we are going to talk about checking for a pulse. In an unresponsive patient, the place where you want to check for a pulse is called the carotid, which is located right here. (on the right side of the neck) You can find that when you have the patient extended, you can kind of feel some of the muscles that extend out to the side of the neck. You can feel your trachea mid line. What you want to do is by finding the muscles, sliding your hand, once they fall in the crevasses in the middle, that is where you located your carotid pulse. The importance for checking for a carotid pulse rather than a radial pulse in your wrist or any other location is it is more accurate. Your pulse by feeling it is just a matter of what your blood pressure is stylistically. What that means is you can actually still be alive, your heart could still be pumping but if your blood pressure isn't high enough you won't feel the pulse. Your radial pulse for example; too distal, once your body starts to shut down and your blood pressure drops, your body then shuts blood away from the extremities and keeps them in your core. So therefore, you could go for a feel for a radial pulse and not feel one and it will be absent and you will think that the patient is in cardio arrest but in reality their body is just said that it doesn't want to give blood to the extremities it rather give it to the core. So you want to give the carotid pulse because that is the most accurate, which could read as low as fifty to sixty for the systolic blood pressure. When it is below that, even if they still do have a heart beat, it is important that you give CPR. On this patient, the time you want to check for a carotid pulse is after you have opened the airway and you have checked for five to ten seconds. You then want to find your location and assess that, not pushing too hard. If you push too hard, you can actually exclude the vessel of the artery and you won't feel anything. So you want to give kind of a gentle pressure, just enough to feel and when you do that you want to feel for five to ten seconds. It is important to never check with your thumb. By checking with your thumb, your thumb actually has its own pulse. So by pushing on something with your thumb, it is common for people to feel a pulse when all reality they are just feeling their own pulse from their thumb.

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