Chest Pain Assessment

Course Overview

This Ausmed Course provides a best-practice, step-by-step guide to conducting a chest pain assessment: from question-taking strategies, all the way through to treatment options for common differential diagnoses. The content of this course is geared towards audiences working in prehospital and emergency department settings.

Topics

• Chest pain overview
• Conducting a comprehensive chest pain diagnostic assessment
• Signs and symptoms of acute coronary syndrome
• Differential diagnoses
• Management options for pain of a cardiac and non-cardiac nature

Need

Every year, over 500,000 people present to emergency departments in Australia with signs and symptoms indicative of a possible heart attack. Though over 80% of these people presenting with chest pain are ultimately not experiencing acute coronary syndromes (ACS), a thorough chest pain assessment is necessary in all of these cases.

With this in mind, education providing an up-to-date and optimised approach to conducting chest pain assessments is essential in order to combat the considerable time and resources these assessments take within our already strained healthcare system.

Purpose

The purpose of this Ausmed Course is to update learners’ knowledge of best-practice care of a person experiencing chest pain, help learners recognise the difference between chest pain of a cardiac nature and of other causes, and inform learners of current best-practice management options for the different origins of chest pain.

Learning Outcomes

• Explain the critical role of chest pain assessments in practice.
• Differentiate between the various types of chest pain and their indicated causes.
• Understand how to conduct a safe, efficient and thorough chest pain assessment.
• Identify and understand key presentations of chest pain and their degree of urgency.
• Confidently apply best-practice management strategies in events of either cardiac or non-cardiac chest pain.

Target Audience

This Ausmed Course is intended for paramedics, nurses and those looking to increase or update their knowledge about the assessment of a patient presenting with chest pain.

Disclosure

No conflict of interest exists for anyone in the position to control content for this activity. Wherever possible, generic or non-proprietary names of medications or products have been used.

Educator

Jeff Kenneally View profile

Jeff Kenneally has a lifelong commitment to pre-hospital care, having served as an operational paramedic for 34 years, mostly in intensive care roles. He has managed frontline paramedic teams, commanded major events, mentored, educated and worked in communications dispatch centres and at the ambulance air wing. His roles have taken him to rural and metropolitan areas. For four years, Jeff managed the Ambulance Victoria clinical practice guidelines. In recent years, Jeff has turned to university lecturing for paramedic students, including leading international study tours. He is a published author in pre-hospital practice and contributor to numerous major textbooks. In 2018, Jeff was awarded the Ambulance Service Medal in recognition of his contribution.