Size Does Matter....

While the automatic blood pressure machine had greatly simplified the procedure of taking blood pressures (BP) by pressing down on the START button, a lack of basic understanding of BP cuff gave me a false reading (148/117 mmHg) when the automatic BP machine was used on a patient with large arm. It was not whether the cuff went around the patient’s arm; it was whether the inflatable "bladder" inside the cuff was the appropriate length and width for the arm size. I did not know the accuracy of a blood pressure recording greatly depends on the correct cuff size.
The patient’s correct BP (128/92 mmHg) was measured manually with the faculty help again. The faculty advised me that there will be more occasions when I need to take a BP manually. Also, it is essential to learn the proper method of measuring BP and when done correctly it is considered more accurately than by using the machine.
With practice of a few simple steps, I was able to take a blood pressure manually. I also realized that so much can be learned by touching a patient's skin, placing the stethoscope to a patient’s arm and taking a minute to do a real BP. Although the automatic BP machine works (supposedly) well on patients with a regular arm size, call me old-fashion, I will try to use the manual BP apparatus as much as I can.