In today’s micro-lecture, Australian Paramedical College Hon. Snr. Lecturer Sam Willis talks about how to manage the Blood Glucometry.
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In today’s micro-lecture, we’re going to talk about blood glucometry. Now, think about your typical patient who’s having a hypoglycemic episode. Hypo meaning low, glycemia referring to sugar. These patients, depending on which point you catch them, tend to have signs and symptoms such as sweating and being slightly pale, full bounding pulse, but the biggest thing that you will notice if they are conscious is that will they will have a certain type of aggression so they will not have a GCS of 15, but instead they will be verbally aggressive.
When you have this type of patient, yes, you have to be safe, but it’s your job to try and get in as quickly as possible and undertake a blood glucometry reading. That’s what we have here on the screen. Now, there are of course going to be situations whereby your patient is going to be in a pre-comatose state or even unconscious and fully comatose. Then of course there are going to be patients who are having a convulsion due to low blood sugar levels. So it’s really important that you’re able to undertake a blood sugar assessment on not quite a wide range of patients.
Now, this image here is a typical blood glucometer. Now what you have here are the test strips, which should come in this container, so it has the container. On the actual test strip itself, you have these vacuum style tip that allows you to suck one drop of blood into it and you have the digital reading part of the strip. Now, as you can see here, the digital part of the strip goes into the machine. Now, there are different types of machines, but they generally do the same thing, so some of the devices, you insert the strip at the top. Sometimes you insert them at the bottom.
Now on most occasions, they will automatically turn on when you place the strip into the machine. Then you of course clean the finger, inject the finger with the needle, and then get one tiny drop of blood, and insert the blood onto the end of the tip here. It’s like a little vacuum. It sucks the blood into the machine and it gives you the reading within about five seconds. That’s the process of blood glucometry. A couple of other things you need to be mindful of when you’re doing this assessment is that if it’s below four, that’s when you treat.
Here, it says number six. That’s actually not a bad reading, and of course, the upper limits are around eight to 10, but again, there’s not a lot you can do for hyperglycemia apart from possibly giving them a bolus of fluids, if that’s in your guidelines. Other things to think about are hands decontamination. Before you do this, make sure you decontaminate your hands, put your gloves on, have the shots pin ready because the land sits that actually inject the finger I’ve actually treated as a shot.
That’s the micro-lecture on a blood glucometry.
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