Periodic and Episodic Patterns (Nursing)

00:01 Now, we understand the relationship between fetal movement and fetal heart rate.

00:06 Is there anything else that could be going on that might affect the fetal heart rate? You got it, contractions.

00:14 So let's talk about some of the NICHD fundamental principles that give us some insight into that.

00:20 There are two patterns that we're going to talk about and they're categorized as periodic or episodic.

00:27 Periodic pattern changes are associated with the contraction, so we see a contraction on the monitor or the patient reports a contraction and then we have a response in the fetal heart rate, they happen at the same time and they're interrelated, they go together, that's a periodic change.

00:45 During an episodic change, the response really doesn't have anything to do with the contraction.

00:51 The client might be contracting to beat the band, but it has nothing to do with the change in the heart rate.

00:57 So just in case you need some help with that, let's show that on this next graph.

01:02 So if you look at this graph, you can see that the change in the fetal heart rate on the top seems to be happening in relationship to the contractions that are on the bottom, periodic.

01:12 On the next graph, you see episodic where it looks like the patient's contracting, but the deceleration that occurs is really just arbitrary.

01:22 It doesn't seem to happen with every contraction.

01:24 That is called an episodic change.

01:27 So now that we have that, let's look at some of the changes that we might see.