On the face of it, yes it's excellent. A wonderful idea. Patients will be diagnosed quicker, and thousands of unnecessary trips to hospital will be saved.
Now let's look a little deeper...
Ignoring the fact that I've yet to come across a practice without access to a normal ECG machine, see if you can spot some of the other flaws in the article... here are a few I noticed:
- Why is it that GPs are unable to recognise ECG changes diagnostic of an MI (heart attack)? Of course, they can - anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of ECGs can identify such diagnostic criteria. So before we even look any closer, we see that the basic premise of the article is flawed (no doubt cynics such as Dr Crippen would say this was a purposeful tactic by the BBC!)
- The BBC's 'Health Correspondent' also seems to be unaware that the lack of ECG changes can't rule out MI, and so in anybody presenting with symptoms who is judged to be at all at risk needs to go to hospital for serial ECGs, monitoring and a 12 hour troponin test (amongst many other things)
- Even if you see no diagnostic changes, there is no clinical suspicion of MI, any patient presenting with a sudden onset of breathlessness or chest pain or any of the other symptoms of MI is reasonably likely to need a chest x-ray, and so will end up going to hospital anyway.
Not that any of that lets the BBC get in the way of a good story!
1 comment:
Ah, the BBC and their scare mongering. I did my internship on a cardiac ward. The only way the cardiologists ever actually were happy was when they went in with the Angiograms and had a good rummage around. I was surprised how many patients I nursed with Non ST Elevation MI (NSTEMI). It is far more common then you may think.
I look forward to seeing more posts on your blog-nice to think there is another norther nurse on the blogsphere.
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