Auscultation is the selected diagnostic tool; it is a diagnostic tool that uses sound to examine the body. It is used to listen to heart, breathing, and bowel sounds. Auscultation is typically used in young children and infants who are unable to speak or communicate effectively (Drake et al., 2020). It can help identify problems such as respiratory infections, heart conditions, and intestinal blockages. Heart sounds are evaluated to assess the condition of the heart, and breath sounds are evaluated to assess the condition of the lungs (Gardezi et al., 2018). The use of a stethoscope allows a doctor or nurse to listen to these sounds more clearly and determine if there is a problem. Auscultation has been used and tested in children and in adults to examine heart conditions.
There are a few ways to know if the test is reliable and valid. The first way is to ensure the person being tested is sick. The second is to make sure that the doctor is listening in the right place; it must not be placed on an irrelevant part of the body (Voin et al., 2017). The best method to make sure that the person being tested is sick is to use a control group. For example, if one wants to test whether or not a cold medication works, they would give half of the people in the study the cold medication and half of the people in the study would not get any medication. Then, one would compare how many people in each group got better.
Auscultation reliability and validity values refer to a measure of how well a test measures what it is developed to measure. It means that there are ways to quantify the accuracy and precision of a test (Voin et al., 2017). The test’s reliability is determined by how well it produces consistent results when administered multiple times to the same group of people. The validity of a test is measured by how well it actually evaluates what it is supposed to measure (Gardezi et al., 2018). Both reliability and validity can be measured in different ways, but two common methods are called Cronbach’s Alpha and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient. Cronbach’s Alpha measures the internal consistency of a test, while Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient evaluates the degree of correlation between two tests.
The auscultation predictive values are the likelihood of a positive result when a test is conducted. In other words, they are chances that a condition is present when a patient has certain symptoms (Voin et al., 2017). For example, if a doctor listens to the patient’s lungs and hears wheezing, he might say that the wheezing is indicative of asthma. This would be an example of using the auscultation predictive values to make a diagnosis.
Auscultation is a highly sensitive way to measure heart and breathing sounds. By listening to the sounds the heart and lungs make, a doctor can often identify problems with these organs. Auscultation can also help doctors determine how well an organ is functioning (Drake et al., 2020). The integration of Auscultation into advanced practice will be considered based on its benefits concerning human heart health. It helps in detecting murmurs, abnormal heart sounds, and abnormal rhythms, which can be a sign of a serious problem with the heart.
References
Drake, R. L., Vogl, A. W., Mitchell, A. W., Tibbitts, R., & Richardson, P. (2020). Gray’s Atlas of anatomy (3rd ed). Elsevier Health Sciences.
Gardezi, S., Myerson, S. G., Chambers, J., Coffey, S., D’Arcy, J., Hobbs, F., Holt, J., Kennedy, A., Loudon, M., Prendergast, A., Prothero, A., Wilson, J., & Prendergast, B. D. (2018). Cardiac auscultation poorly predicts the presence of valvular heart disease in asymptomatic primary care patients.Heart,104(22), 1832–1835. Web.
Voin, V., Oskouian, R. J., Loukas, M., & Tubbs, R. S. (2017). Auscultation of the heart: The Basics with Anatomical Correlation. Clinical Anatomy, 30(1), 58–60. Web.