COMPARING BLOOD PRESSURE MEASUREMENT OVER A SLEEVED ARM VERSES ROLLED-UP SLEEVE IN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT

Abstract

A Blood Pressure (BP) measurement is an essential and routine nursing practice in all healthcare settings. In public emergency departments, nurses are extremely busy with many tasks to accomplish in a limited timeframe, including BP and other vital signs taking. Nurses often are challenged whether to ask patients to roll-up their arm sleeve to place the BP cuff or apply the cuff over the sleeved arm. This study aims to examine whether a difference exists in BP measurements over sleeved arms against rolled-up arms. A prospective clinical study was conducted on 115 patients, who visited two emergency departments in two public hospitals in Saudi Arabia. The study adopted paired t-test to parallel the measured BP through the measurement conditions and the multiple ANOVA adjusting for age group and hospital. Out of the 115 participants with mean age of 30.58 years, the mean BP of the sleeved arm and rolled-up sleeve arm was 124.94 (SD 11.372)/ 78.11 (SD 10.420) mmHg and 125.42 (SD 12.223)/ 79.09 (SD 9.864) mmHg respectively. There was no clinically significant difference between BP measurements over a sleeved arm compared to a bare arm. The outcomes were in agreement with previous studies.