Impact of Operator Hearing Threshold on Manual Blood Pressure Measurement

INTRODUCTION: Undetected hearing impairment among health personnel could affect their ability to obtain accurate blood pressure (BP) measurements with consequent negative impact on patient care. The aim of this paper was to determine the impact of operator hearing threshold on manual BP measurement. METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional study involving 25 patients and 60 health personnel consisting of 25 doctors (Group 1), 25 nurses (Group 2), and 10 specially selected, normal hearing and trained control group (Group 3). Group 3 personnel measured BP of each patient and this was considered accurate. After preliminary training on BP measurement technique, one person each from Groups 1 and 2 measured BP of a patient using manual auscultation technique and then proceeded to have a screening pure tone audiogram (PTA) with threshold of the best hearing ear recorded. RESULTS: Majority of personnel had normal hearing (PTA ≤25 dB), 22% had hearing threshold >25 dB on screening, with debilitating hearing loss noted in one person (2%). There was a complete agreement in BP measurements between participants with hearing threshold ≤25 dB and the control group, but in participants with threshold >25 dB, 100% recorded inaccurate diastolic BP and 64% recorded inaccurate systolic BP with tendency to underestimate systolic and overestimate diastolic BP. CONCLUSION: Hearing impairment is not uncommon among health personnel, resulting in inaccurate BP recordings. Audiograms should be obtained whenever health personnel notice frequent differences in measured BP compared to colleagues. Training on BP measurement technique resulted in accurate BP measurement by all normal hearing participants.