Caring for patients with cardiac conditions

Lucy Sumners, RVT, VTS(ECC), from the University of Florida Small Animal Hospital in Gainesville, is presenting 3 education sessions on cardiology Friday, September 27, 2024, at the Southwest Veterinary Symposium in Fort Worth, Texas. In an interview with dvm360, she previewed these lectures and shared her goal for them. The topics include electrocardiograms (ECG) interpretation and common abnormalities in cardiology, tachyarrhythmia and Bradyarrhythmia, and cardiac emergencies with triage and veterinary technician care.

Sumners is also presenting 3 sessions on Saturday, September 28, at the SWVS event. These sessions will discuss marijuana toxicosis, gastrointestinal diseases, and acute kidney management.

The following is a transcript of the video:

Lucy Sumners, RVT, VTS(ECC): I really want people to feel more comfortable with evaluating [Electrocardiograms] (ECGs) and recognizing abnormalities for heart disease. That's probably the biggest thing that I hear during my training sessions is, ‘Oh, I'm so bad at ECG. I'm so bad. I know that there's something wrong, but I don't know what it is.’ And so giving them kind of practical ECG examples and then tying it in with videos, so the first lecture is just the very basics: What are our most common ECG abnormalities that we see in the emergency room? What do we need to do at that point? And then the next one delves into dysrhythmias even more. And so, if it's a tachyarrhythmia, what are we doing? And what disease process is it associated with versus a Bradyarrhythmia? Then I do a quiz at the end.

The last lecture is just about the triage of nursing care for these patients, because it is quite frequent that our older animals get heart disease, and they may not just go to an emergency clinic, they may show up at the general practice, and it's okay. So what do you do in this in this stage? Because there are things you can do, even if you don't have specialty equipment.