• Matthew J Nordness, Ashly C Westrick, Heidi Chen, and Mark A Clay.
• Matthew J. Nordness is a first-year medical student at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee. At the time this work was performed, he was a registered nurse in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit at the Monroe Carell Jr Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt.
• Crit Care Nurse. 2019 Apr 1; 39 (2): e1-e7.

BackgroundLow cardiac output syndrome is a transient constellation of signs and symptoms that indicate the heart's inability to supply sufficient oxygen to tissues and end-organs to meet metabolic demand. Because the term lacks a standard clinical definition, the bedside diagnosis of this syndrome can be difficult.ObjectiveTo evaluate concordance among pediatric cardiac intensive care unit nurses in their identification of low cardiac output syndrome in pediatric patients after cardiac surgery.MethodsAn anonymous survey was distributed to 69 pediatric cardiac intensive care unit nurses. The survey described 10 randomly selected patients aged 6 months or younger who had undergone corrective or palliative cardiac surgery at a freestanding children's hospital in a tertiary academic center. For each patient, data were presented corresponding to 5 time points (0, 6, 12, 18, and 24 hours postoperatively). The respondent was asked to indicate whether the patient had low cardiac output syndrome (yes or no) at each time point on the basis of the data presented.ResultsThe response rate was 46% (32 of 69 nurses). The overall Fleiss k value was 0.30, indicating fair agreement among raters. When the results were analyzed by years of experience, agreement remained only slight to fair.ConclusionsRegardless of years of experience, nurses have difficulty agreeing on the presence of low cardiac output syndrome. Further research is needed to determine whether the development of objective guidelines could improve recognition and facilitate communication between the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit nurse and the medical team.©2019 American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.

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