Respiratory Rate Assessment: Nursing Skills

Nurses and other healthcare providers such as respiratory therapists and physicians, often have a need to calculate a patient's respiratory rate as part of their routine and emergent assessments.

Come and practice our skills at taking a respiratory rate as inside this video I give you a patient to assess :)

Respiratory rate is one element of a respiratory assessment and involves us gathering information from our patients without them knowing ... kinda like a ninja!

Perhaps you have already had a time when you walked into a patient's room and you were wondering OMG! are they even breathing! The best way to know is to conduct a set of vitals.

When conducting an assessment of the respiratory system, we look at three elements: rate, rhythm, and effort.

If the rate is regular, you can do a 30-second count and multiply your response by 2 to get a one minute total. If the rate is irregular, you will need to conduct a full minute count. While assessing the rate, you will want to also note if the pattern is regular and predictable or irregular. The last quality to assess is the effort. If the patient is relaxed and in no distress, we call that unlabored. If the patient is using accessory muscles such as indrawing, nasal flare, pursed-lip breathing, mouth breathing, hiking of shoulders, you would call that labored breathing.

There are three tips in the video to help you complete a respiratory rate assessment without the patient becoming aware. This is important because as soon as the patient does become aware - they will think about their breathing and it usually causes them to breathe faster!


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