Anesthesiology

With constant pressure on healthcare providers to improve the quality and efficiency of care while reducing costs, standardization of patient management is a logical step towards more streamlined services. Anesthesia is one area that is beginning to embrace this approach, combining regional nerve blocks with ultrasound guidance to improve both the quality and effectiveness of patient care while minimizing hospital stays.

A Sonosite SII point-of-care ultrasound system recently played a key role in an innovative procedure of thyroid surgery without the use of general anesthetic.
Dr. Rüdiger Eichholz, a consultant anesthetist working for private practice in Stuttgart, Germany, explained the case.

Anaesthetists working in perioperative medicine have increasingly taken a whole body approach to patient evaluation known as TUBE – Total Ultrasound Body Examination – thanks to the development of point-of-care ultrasound.

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is rapidly becoming a crucial tool for emergency medicine in Germany, and it's increasingly common for ambulances and emergency doctor vehicles to be equipped with POCUS systems. Dr.

For the past 20-odd years in the United States, traumatic and acute conditions have often been treated in the Emergency Room using opioid drugs. Now, with the effects of a nationwide opioid addiction crisis becoming increasingly dire, hospitals and trauma centers are looking for new ways to treat pain without prescribing addictive opioid painkillers.

Log into Sonosite Institute today, and begin your ultrasound-guided paravertebral nerve block education with our new learning module.

This module will show you how to:

Dr. Thomas Grau, Head of Anaesthesia, Surgery, Intensive Care, Emergency Medicine and Pain at the Gütersloh Clinic, first studied ultrasound for a PhD on spinal imaging at Heidelberg University Hospital in the 1990s. 25 years on, he reflects on the role point-of-care ultrasound now plays in anaesthesia. 

"My first encounters with ultrasound were guided by efforts in Heidelberg to improve epidural anaesthesia in obstetrics.

What departments are the heaviest users of point-of-care ultrasound in an American-based hospital?

The answer varies from hospital to hospital, but we usually see Emergency Medicine, Cardiology, Critical Care and Anaesthesiology rounding out the heavyweight users of bedside ultrasound.

Dr. Francis Yamazaki is a 30 year veteran in Anesthesiology. He is an Anesthesiologist with a cutting edge sports medicine group at Kerlan Jobe Surgery Center, LA. In this interview, he discusses the expectations of patients in the elite world of sports and the progression of anesthesia, particularly in the realm of nerve blocks. In particular how the progress of technology has improved safety for both patients and surgeons.

At Sonosite we are very fortunate to know a large group of doctors and care workers who are invested in global public health.  Those rare people that go to remote locations to treat patients and train the local healthcare workers rely on Sonosite to provide them with the ultrasound equipment necessary.  Through charities, they are often able to provide ultrasound equipment to be left at the location and used by the newly trained staff.