Hello and welcome to the basic rhythm recognition class with Rodney Mills Paul. I'll be your host today. I'm a nationally registered EMT and a Florida State certified paramedic. I'm also an American Heart Association BLS ACLs, and pals instructor as well as training center faculty. That just means I get to train other instructors and also teach ECG and pharmacology for the American Heart Association. Today we'll be discussing how to identify the basic cardiac rhythms.

So the key to recognizing cardiac rhythms is actually knowing what waves we're looking at. There are basically five different waves within a cardiac cycle. The first wave is the P wave. The P wave tells us that the atria just depolarized, or fired, sending electricity and blood down to the ventricles. And when the ventricles receive this information, it creates the QRS complex. And after the after the ventricles that spit out the blood to the rest of the body, then the heart goes into what we call its refractory period.

That's where we see the T wave. Now the T wave tells us that the heart is repolarizing or just targeting his battery again, just to simply start the cardiac process again. Now the T wave is a very important part of the cardiac cycle is a very vulnerable time when the heart is returning its battery once again. And we'll talk about that later. There are basically six questions that you should ask yourself every single time that you're trying to identify what rhythm you're looking at. And those six steps are, is the heart beating fast or is it beatings.

Slow. Now we're not splitting atoms here. We're just saying, Hey, is this thing beating slow? Or is it beating fast? The next question you should ask yourself, is the rhythm regular or irregular? And by that, is it beating at a regular rate?

Or is it beating at an irregular rate? And this will be really easy to determine, once we get along further in this course. The third question that you should ask yourself is, is my QRS complex wide was my QRS complex, narrow? Now let's talk about those for a second. Basically, anytime we have a narrow QRS complex, that tells us that the atria is in control of that heartbeat. Now, it's always the Atreus job to be in control.

It's never the ventricles job. So with that said, here's how I like to identify whether it's narrow, or whether it's wide. So basically, I just take my hands and I say, hey, it's my QRS complex, narrow, and that flumes the letter A that tells me that the h3 is in control. If my QRS complex is wide, I do this with My hands and it tells me that the ventricles are in control. They keep in mind, it's not the ventricles job to be in control, but sometimes they bully the atria and they do take over. So the fourth thing we need to ask ourselves is, hey, do I see a P wave?

Now if I see a P wave, I'm okay calling that rhythm sinus in nature. If I don't see a P wave, I cannot use the word sinus. So just keep that in mind. The next question to ask yourself is, is the P wave close to the QRS complex? Or is it far away from the QRS complex? And then is there a P wave for every QRS complex?

By answering these six questions for every rhythm that you'd like to identify? This will help you better identify the rhythm and be able to determine what it is