hey everyone it's Sarah with registered nurse rn.com and in this video I want to demonstrate for you how to count a respiratory rate this is one of those very important bottle sign skills that you have to do as a nurse or a nursing assistant so in this video what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over the basics of counting a respiratory rate and then I'm going to show you how to do it on a real person so first let's cover the basics whenever you are looking at the respiratory rate on a patient you're looking for several things first thing you're going to be looking at is the Rhythm and you're going to look at the breathing effort of the patient whenever you're looking at the rhythm you're looking at to see if it's regular or irregular and what you're paying attention to is that inspiratory phase and that expiratory phase the inspiratory phase is whenever they inhale take a breath in an expiratory phase is whenever they exhale take a breath out and watch your looking at is to make sure that they are equal because in some patients for instance patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease copy the expiratory phase will be a little bit longer than the inspiratory phase so they'll take a breath in and then they'll breathe out and it'll be a lot longer now next thing you're going to look for is how's the patient breathing are they having difficulty moving air are they having dmia where they're going or is it just effortless for them they're not really even aware that they're breathing just like how you're blinking so you want to pay attention to that next you want to count that breathing rate you want to make sure that it is within the normal range for an adult a normal range is 12 to 20 breaths per minute so we're making sure that they meet that criteria so to do this typically what you do is whenever you go in to do your botal signs you'll collect them and you'll count a radial pul by feeling on the radial artery and you'll count that for 30 seconds if it's regular and then while you're still holding the radial pulse site you are going to look at the chest of the patient and you are looking to see how that chest is rising and falling and you're counting those Rising the rising and the falling as one breath because one inspiration and one expiration equals one breath and you're going to do that for 30 seconds and after 30 seconds you'll take that number multiply it by two and that is your respiratory rate so the reason you want to hold the radial pulse why you're counting the patient's respirations is because if a patient knows that you're counting the respirations they're going to throw them off and it's just like blinking if you tell someone I'm going to measure how much you blink the person's going to be aware of how much they're blinking and they're going to be conscious of it and it's going to throw what the normal rate would be so after you get done done counting the respirations let them know that you were counting the respirations now let me show you how to count respirations on a person hi my name is Sarah and I'm going to be your nurse today and I'm going to take your Vital Signs is that okay with you absolutely okay so I've performed hand hygiene and we're going to get his Vital Signs so let me see your wrist and I'm going to feel your pulse e okay so your pulse rate was 70 and your respiration rate was 20 so that is how you count a respiratory rate now be sure to check out my other videos on how to do other nursing skills and thank you so much for watching and please consider subscribing to this YouTube channel