Angina Attack – GTN Spray – Glyceryl Trinitrate

We’ve recently had involvement in an incident where the casualty was feeling chest pains and, following a heart attack a few months ago, was carrying her GTN spray.  The issue was the casualty had never had explained to her the what, how and when for using GTN.

There are some important points for using the spray, and the first is to make sure the casualty is sitting down!  The effect Glyceryl Trinitrate has is to drop the blood pressure and basically divert blood to the heart.  So what happens is there isn’t enough blood to keep the casualty standing up.

Here is the algorithm to follow –