St. Emlyn´s - By Natalie May - October 26, 2020
"If you’re an avid follower of FOAM, you’ll have seen many assertions that manual pulse checks by healthcare providers during cardiac arrest are pretty unreliable at best.
The most commonly advocated alternatives are EtCO2 increase suggesting perfusion (quick and easy but not particularly sensitive), arterial line waveform assessment (an inevitable intervention once you do achieve ROSC and useful for guiding more nuanced adrenaline dosing, but not always easy to achieve during arrest itself) and various uses of point-of-care-ultrasound (POCUS). It’s the use of POCUS to determine the presence of carotid pulsation (rather than cardiac motion) that has been investigated in this paper published in Resuscitation and written by some of my colleagues out here in Sydney..."