hey everyone it's sarah thread sterner sori and calm and today I want to demonstrate how to check a blood pressure manually first you'll need to perform hand hygiene and gather your supplies you'll need a stethoscope and a manual blood pressure cuff so let's measure a blood pressure manually to do that we want to make sure a patient is sitting down with their arm at heart level and their legs are uncross now they're lying in bed you would want to make sure that this arm is at heart level then what we're going to do is we are going to get our stethoscope and our blood pressure cuff and you want to make sure you get the right size cuff for your patients arm because if you use too big of a cuff or too small of a company can throw off the reading and what we're gonna do is we're gonna palpate the brachial artery because this is the artery we're gonna be listening to to get our blood pressure because we're going to be getting our systolic number which is that top number and this is the first sound we hear and then our diastolic number which is the bottom number and this is the point where we no longer hear the sound so whenever we're looking at the gauge of our blood pressure cuff we want to make sure we're really noting those points because it's gonna tell us our systolic and diastolic number so what we're going to do is we're going to put our cuff on our patient and we want to make sure we find the brachial artery this is the artery we palpate that we'll be using to determine our blood pressure and it's found in the bend of the arm so we're going to find it and it is located here and we're going to look on our cuff and our cuff has these arrows and because this is the left arm we're going to make sure that this arrow is pointing in that direction of where that artery is so you're gonna put the cuff up about two inches above the bend of the arm first what we want to do is we want to estimate the systolic pressure so we want to find that number to do that we're going to palpate the brachial artery and we're going to inflate the cuff until I no longer feel the brachial artery and point when I no longer feel it I need to make sure I'm looking at this gauge to know that number because that number is our estimated systolic pressure number then when I go to take the blood pressure I'm going to inflate the cuff 30 millimeters of mercury more than the estimated number now the whole reason for doing that is because we want to avoid missing the auscultate gap that can occur in some patients on all patients have it but some it's usually patients with hypertension because the oskol Tauri gap is like this abnormal silence that can occur and it will throw off whenever you actually hear that first sound which is your systolic number so I'm inflating the cuff by filling on the artery and I'm going to note the point where I no longer feel the artery which is about at the hundred then I'm going to deflate it completely and wait about thirty to sixty seconds and then we'll take the blood pressure so we're estimated systolic number is a hundred now I'm going to inflate the cuff to a hundred and thirty and that will avoid missing the oscillatory gap if one was present so I'm going to take my stethoscope put it in my ears you can use the bell or the diaphragm of your stethoscope I like to use the Bell because it's best at picking up low pitched noises so we're going to place that over the brachial artery do it lightly don't fully compress it because you can include the artery then we're going to inflate our cuff to a hundred and thirty millimeters of mercury and we're going to let it fall about two millimeters of mercury per second and we're listening for that first sandwiches our systolic number okay is 104 and we're listening for that last sound and it was 78 so the blood pressure is 104 over 78 then once you have your reading make sure you fully deflate the cuff full of air and you're going to take the cuff off of your patient of course and clean it if it's not disposable and you will document the blood pressure and what arm you took it in now water normal blood pressure readings according to the American College of Cardiology 2017 updated guidelines a normal blood pressure is a systolic less than 120 and a diastolic less than 80 elevated blood pressure would be considered a systolic of 120 to 129 and a diastolic less than 80 hypertension stage one would be a systolic of 130 to 139 or a diastolic 80 to 89 and hypertension stage 2 would be a systolic greater than 140 and a diastolic greater than 90 okay so that is how to check a blood pressure manually thank you so much for watching and don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more videos