title: Accuracy of clinical assessment of infant heart rate in the delivery room.
abstract: Heart rate (HR) dictates intervention during neonatal resuscitation. Guidelines recommend that HR be assessed by auscultation or palpation. We compared HRs determined clinically with electrocardiography (ECG) in healthy newborns in the delivery room. Clinical assessment by 23 observers randomly allocated to assess HR by one of two methods in 26 infants, was found to be inaccurate and underestimate ECG HR. The mean difference between HR assessed by auscultation and palpation ECG and HR using methodology recommended by the Neonatal Resuscitation Programme was 14 and 22 beats per minute respectively.
authors.affiliation: Division of Newborn Services, Royal Women's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia. omar.kamlin@rwh.org.au
authors.forename: C Omar F
authors.initials: CO
authors.lastname: Kamlin
authors.forename: Colm P F
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: O'Donnell
authors.forename: Neil J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Everest
authors.forename: Peter G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Davis
authors.forename: Colin J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Morley
mesh_terms: D003696:Delivery Rooms; D004562:Electrocardiography; D005865:Gestational Age; D006326:Heart Auscultation; D006339:Heart Rate; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D015588:Observer Variation; D010173:Palpation; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D012016:Reference Values; D015203:Reproducibility of Results