In today’s micro-lecture, Australian Paramedical College Hon. Snr. Lecturer Sam Willis talks about the bag valve mask (BVM) ventilator which is used to resuscitate people instead of placing your face and lips over their mouth and nose, to be able to provide ventilation during either a respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest.
In today’s micro-lecture, we’re going to talk about the bag valve mask ventilator. Now some of you may have seen this before, some of you may have even used it before. Some of you have maybe only used it in training. And then there will be others who maybe haven’t got that far in their course yet to even see, or I’ve heard of this.
Now, you may have even seen it on the TV being used in medical documentaries or dramas. So this is the bag valve mask ventilator used to resuscitate people instead of placing your face, your lips over their mouth and nose to be able to provide ventilation’s during either a respiratory arrest or cardiac arrest. So this device is used by healthcare professionals once they’ve received training. That’s you guys. So, you guys will be able to use this in workshops one and two.
Now on this image you can see a number of things. Let’s go through these together. So when we talk about the BVM, bag valve mask, this is the bag here. This is the valve and this is the mask, the face mask. So these really are the main components, bag, valve, mask. The other components are the reservoir bag. So technically there’s two bags, the oxygen tube in, this expiratory valve and another valve here, which we’ll talk about in a moment. So they are the key parts.
Now when you’re resuscitating someone, you need to do a mixture of 30 to two, 30 to two, so 30 chest compressions and two breaths. Now as a healthcare professional you will use this. Now the first thing you’d have to try and remember is that the oxygen needs to be connecting up to the valve here. Now this will fill the reservoir bag with oxygen so that when you squeeze the bag here, the patient will receive some high quality medical grade oxygen and not just atmospheric air.
Now this peep valve here is designed as a special protective mechanism. So if a patient’s got some constriction or damage in the lungs, it stops you from over inflating the lungs. Instead of the false air going into the lungs, it will come out of this peep valve. Now the way that we apply this to our patients is using what we call an EC grip or an okay grip. So these three fingers here would go underneath our patient’s jaw and these, the C would go around the mask.
So let me show you what that looks like on this image. So here you can see that E, all the capital, the lines within the capital E, and that’s the C. So it’s called the okay grip, the EC grip, or even the anaesthetist grip. So, that’s the Bag Valve Mask (BVM) ventilator. I hope you’ve enjoyed this micro lecture. You will get a chance to practice it at the workshops.
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