Email Discussion Group: October 2009

Send us your EP questions! Do you have an issue you would like to see addressed by our discussion group? Email us at eplabdigest@hotmail.com or post your question on https://eplabdigest.com/discussion-questions. We look forward to hearing from you!

Under Discussion:

Admitting Patients After AF Ablation If your facility performs AF ablations, are patients admitted following the procedure? What are your reasons for admitting/not admitting these patients? Also, do your AF ablation patients usually receive moderate sedation or general anesthesia for the procedure? — S. Deck (To reply to this question, reply to “Admitting Patients.”) In our facility the patients are admitted following the procedure. This is done so that we can observe and monitor them following the procedure. Our patients can receive either moderate sedation or general anesthesia for the procedures, and this is based on the physicians' knowledge of the patient. If anesthesia is present they monitor the sedation, but generally the patient is mildly sedated with additional sedation given during the ablation part of the study. — Connie, Madison, WI At our hospital, AF ablation patients are generally admitted for overnight observation. Our sedation plan is generally tailored to the patient according to a risk assessment. General anesthesia is used for higher risk patients, and EP nurse-administered moderate sedation for those patients at lower risk. — Doug Passey, RCIS, RCES

Under Discussion:

AF Ablations Two physician groups at our hospital have recently recruited AF docs. We do not currently have an AF program in our EP lab. Plans have been made to purchase an ESI (St. Jude Medical) mapping system, and we use EP MedSystems. Does anyone have suggestions or a guide on how we should go about training our staff? The biggest part of learning is the plan; any help would be appreciated, especially orientation timelines, classes that would be helpful and/or books that could be helpful for the beginner staff. We currently do more simple ablations (i.e., atrial flutter, SVT, WPW). — anonymous (To reply to this question, reply to “AF Ablations.”)