August 2015
Benjamin
Schuler
,
RN
CATH LAB
Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center
Baton Rouge
,
LA
United States

 

 

 

I received a text and the team was asking for help with a double STEMI. This is rare and difficult for one call team to handle. I told them that I would be there in 10 minutes. We would have 6 people to run 2 STEMI's. The ideal staffing number for 1 STEMI is 4 team members but we can make do with 3 per and if needed we could manage with 2 at the absolute minimum. Once the 2nd patient got to the lab the pager went off again for a 3rd STEMI. This is rare. All 3 STEMI's were within 40 minutes of each other. This has never happened in our lab. The previous protocol in the event of this happening was to work the 1st 2 STEMI's in the lab and treat the 3rd with TPA. TPA is acceptable but not the optimal standard of care. Our team told the ER to go ahead and send the 3rd STEMI. I was also able to reach out to two other RNs to come to the lab immediately to help. They dropped what they were doing and came. We now had 3 critical STEMI's working at once. The team had perfect precision in their performance. The patients all met the door to balloon time in less than 60 minutes and one patient was even put on a balloon pump. I have never seen a team execute as we did on that night.