POCUS education

Emergency physicians must make life-saving decisions as quickly as possible to choose the correct treatment and direct patients to an appropriate hospital. Emergency department chief Dr. Sylvain Benenati and emergency doctor Dr. David Sapir, both from Melun Hospital in France, discuss how the dynamic nature of point-of-care ultrasound makes it invaluable in these busy environments.

Consultant and trainee anesthetists from Surrey, England traveled to Lusaka, Zambia with a point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) system to train Zambian colleagues in ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia. Dr. Madankumar Narayanan describes the educational objectives of the visit and the enthusiastic response from doctors in Zambia, as the team demonstrated the benefits of ultrasound-guided interventions in classroom workshops and on patients.

Dr. Philippe Mahiou practices anesthesia in the Grenoble area of France, splitting his time between a private clinic and working as a helicopter doctor attending mountaineering accidents. As part of his work, Dr. Mahiou routinely uses ultrasound, and understands the importance of the technology for both guiding anesthesia in the operating room and assessing patients in the field.

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) systems are becoming a common sight in nephrology departments and renal dialysis clinics, helping clinical staff to evaluate and effectively access the vasculature of dialysis patients. Dr. Jean-Yves Bosc, a nephrologist and vascular doctor working at the nonprofit private health establishment AIDER SANTÉ in the South of France, has been a champion of ultrasound for over a decade.

Because ultrasound is not extensively taught in medical schools, clinicians are often left scrambling to learn this essential technology in an often chaotic ER or other high-pressure situations. Sonosite Institute was designed to address this very issue. Sonosite Institute empowers POCUS users to learn ultrasound techniques, applications, and best practices wherever and whenever it’s convenient for them.

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is widely used in nephrology for guiding the creation of fistulas and informing decisions on their viability and performance for dialysis. 

Have you ever considered using point-of-care ultrasound but didn’t know where to begin?

FUJIFILM Sonosite customers have a powerful tool to help them ramp up their scanning skills, making the POCUS learning curve a lot less steep.

Anyone who has ever tried to change the way medicine is practiced knows that inertia makes it difficult to get buy-in from colleagues and administrators. Introducing a relatively familiar technology, like point-of-care ultrasound, into a broader hospital setting might not seem like a difficult task, but all procedural changes face some kind of resistance.