Pain Management Alternatives for Women
Gender differences based on culturally defined roles create unique issues for women with respect to pain and opioid addiction and misuse. A report issued earlier this summer by the U.S. Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force, “Pain Management Best Practices: Updates, Gaps, Inconsistencies, and Recommendations”, focuses on issues related to women as part of its extensive review of how acute and chronic pain are treated in this country.
The Task Force report indicates that women are more likely than men to misuse prescription opioids. Furthermore, from 1999 to 2010, the…
Making the Most of Ultrasound-Guided Regional Anesthesia
AnethesiologyNews.com
Theresa Bowling MD, Wesley Knauft MD, Nishant Shah MD, Sanja Sinha MD
The use of ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia (UGRA) has dramatically increased in recent years, facilitated by the widespread availability of small portable ultrasound machines with high-resolution imaging. Numerous studies have shown that UGRA is the most effective technique to achieve the central requirement for safe, successful regional anesthesia blocks—namely, ensuring the optimal distribution of local anesthetic around the target nerves and minimizing the risk for injury to surrounding…
Establishing an Ultrasound-Guided Vascular Access Program
Axis Imaging News
Judy Padula, MSN, RN and Matthew Ostroff, ARNP
Establishing vascular access is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures and plays a central role in patient care. However, obtaining PIV access is difficult in about 35% of patients who present to the emergency department. Ultrasound-guided vascular access can help address this issue, but a hospital must first create a program to educate clinicians in leveraging POCUS for this procedure. Nurses Judy Padula and Matthew Ostroff outline five steps in establishing an ultrasound-guided vascular access program: Identify…
What is ERAS (Enhanced Recovery after Surgery) and How Is It Supporting Better Patient Outcomes?
DOTMed HealthCareBusiness NewsPhilip Corvo, MD, MA, FACSDr. Philip Corvo serves as chairman of the Stanley J. Dudrick Department Surgery and Director of Surgical Critical Care at Saint Mary's Hospital, Trinity Health Of New England, located in Waterbury, Connecticut. He leads an innovative ERAS (Enhanced Recovery after Surgery) program which is helping reduce opioid use, speeding patient recovery and reducing costs. DOTMed interviewed Dr. Corvo about the program he leads, in which he discusses the financial impact of ERAS, how to establish an ERAS program, and patient success stories. …
Emergency Physician Brings Ultrasound to Rural Guatemala
Emergency physician Dr. Elijah Katz has worked with Sonosite ultrasound machines for several clinical and teaching missions around the world. Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is a large part of Dr. Katz’s practice both at home and abroad, and he currently serves as a Fellow in Combined Clinical Ultrasound and Global Health in the Department of Emergency Medicine at University of Texas, San Antonio. His most recent medical trip was the 2019 ¡Vamos Guatemala! mission, a biannual project with the Long School of Medicine at UT San Antonio. Dr. Katz was one of four supervising doctors from UT San…
Medical Mission to Kenya Introduces High School Students to Ultrasound
Dr. Martin Kelly is an attending physician in the Emergency Medicine Residency Program at Darnall Army Medical Center, Fort Hood, Texas. He has been involved in mission trips for 15 years, most of them in conjunction with Maranatha Volunteers International located in Sacramento, California. Dr. Kelly was kind enough to write a report about this nonprofit and its collaboration with Sonosite.
Maranatha Volunteers International is a non-profit Christian organization with the primary focus of organizing volunteers to build churches and schools in developing nations. They sponsor many short…
New Government Recommendations Advance Interventional Approaches to Improve Pain Management
With the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issuing a Request for Information on ways to address the treatment of acute and chronic pain, and the treatment of substance use disorders including opioid use disorder, it is an appropriate time to focus on new recommendations contained in a report issued by the U.S. Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force. These recommendations are aimed at increasing access to and greater use of interventional procedures for perioperative pain control. Interventional procedures include various non-opioid medications, ultrasound-…
POCUS for Emergency Medicine Helps Save Lives
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.
POCUS on the Road
Melun Hospital is located about 40 kilometers south of Paris. It is the headquarters of the urgent medical aid service (SAMU) for Seine et Marne—the biggest department in the Paris area—as…
Learning to Master Ultrasound-Guided Pain Control in Zambia
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.
Responding to a Need in Zambia
Anesthetic trainees in the UK often undertake an "out-of-program" fellowship to developing countries to expand…
Humanitarian Doctor Returns to Haiti with Sonosite M-Turbo
In our June 2017 blog post, we reported on gynecologist/obstetrician Dr. Audrey “Dree” Stryker’s mission with the IWISH Foundation to Haiti with the M-Turbo. Dr. Stryker recently sent our Sonosite Global Health program another report from her most recent medical mission to Haiti. She had borrowed a Sonosite M-Turbo with C60x and ICTx transducers from the Global Health Loaner Pool.
In her letter describing the 2019 mission to Haiti (accompanied by her colleague, urogynecologist Dr. Robert Hosty), Dr. Stryker went into detail of how she used the M-Turbo, with our first successful portable…
Addressing Addiction and Pain Management in Our Nation’s Military and Veteran Populations
Over the last two years, the U.S. Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force studied how pain is treated in the military and veteran populations to make recommendations to improve the treatment of acute and chronic pain. The Task Force issued its report earlier this summer, “Pain Management Best Practices: Updates, Gaps, Inconsistencies, and Recommendations,” which highlights the barriers to optimal pain care and the reduction of opioid misuse among veterans and military personnel.The Task Force report discusses the challenges in treating pain that are specific to the military and…
Benefits of Ultrasound Guided Cannulation
Thanks to an Emergency Medicine Foundation (EMF) research grant, a new ultrasound guided cannulation training initiative is helping emergency department clinicians in Australia more easily find a patient’s vein for cannulation. Gold Coast University Hospital Emergency Department physician Dr. Amy Archer-Jones was awarded an EMF research grant to lead a year-long study analyzing the effectiveness of an ultrasound training intervention.
Dr. Archer-Jones said the results of the study were good news for older patients and patients with chronic diseases or illness who are in regular need of…
Charitable Medical Mission Uses Ultrasound for Maternal Care in Zambia
Australian nonprofit Globalinks Medical Foundation is dedicated to providing healthcare to global communities in remote locations where access to healthcare services is limited. Globalinks was founded by Dr. Peter Locke and his wife Carolyn following their experiences volunteering overseas, where they witnessed a prevalence of of illness, disease, and child mortality rates, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
Globalinks works with local health staff, providing much needed supplies and equipment and planning with local health ministries to achieve sustainable progress towards positive health…
A Solid Future for ICU Ultrasound
Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) has become an established tool for the rapid assessment and diagnosis of patients across a variety of medical disciplines, not least in the high-pressure environment of intensive care medicine.
Dr. Timm Steuber, senior consultant and head of the ICU at Evangelisches Krankenhaus Unna, Germany, discussed his day-to-day use of ICU ultrasound and why he considers POCUS increasingly important. Dr. Steuber started his career as a paramedic before training in medicine and specializing in anesthesia. In his role as a helicopter doctor, he readily recognized…
U.S. Government Report Provides Recommendations and Opportunities during National Pain Management Month
Earlier this summer, the U.S. Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force issued the report “Pain Management Best Practices: Updates, Gaps, Inconsistencies, and Recommendations.” The U.S. Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force (Task Force) was created under the 2016 Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA) to address the treatment of acute and chronic pain that has driven the nation’s opioid epidemic. The report’s release is particularly timely since September is National Pain Management Month, when policymakers and stakeholders across the healthcare…
Using POCUS for the Patient in Shock
In a 2018 article published in the ICU: Management & Practice section of HealthMangement.org, Drs. Adrian Wong and Jonathan Wilkinson discussed the benefits of deploying point-of-care ultrasound for patients in various forms of shock. They conclude that POCUS can help the clinician to more accurately identify the type of shock, or the coexistence of different types of shock. With proper target management strategies, ultrasound is an invaluable tool for emergency physicians and intensivists.
Shock is a common enough occurrence in the ED and ICU, and can co-exist in different forms. The…
Learn Here. Not Here.
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.Sonosite Institute’s online courses, extensive eLibrary, webinars, and additional resources allow users to learn at their own pace in a relaxed, well-organized setting instead of a hectic…
Operation Restore Hope Uses Sonosite iViz for Charitable Dental Mission
Operation Restore Hope is an Australia-based surgical charity for less fortunate children in the Philippines with birth defects and deformities, especially cleft lip and cleft palate.
ORH was founded in 1993 by Sydney plastic surgeon Dr. Darryl Hodgkinson and has carried out more than 2,500 operations.
Sonosite’s Global Health Loaner Pool recently loaned ORH a Sonosite iViz portable ultrasound machine for a recent mission. Anesthetist Dr. Karthik Nagarajan sent us this account:
"ORH sends one surgical mission to Manila (Las Piñas City Medical Center) each year to conduct five days of…
POCUS Profile: Nurse Practitioner Matt Ostroff
Matt Ostroff, MSN APN VABC, the vascular access coordinator at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paterson, New Jersey, is leading a revolution in point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS). Ostroff has helped pioneer a multi-disciplinary approach for vascular access, bringing different specialists to the patient bedside. Bedside vascular access saves patients pain, time, and expense, while greatly increasing safety. The medical community has taken notice. Dr. Benita Zahn of News13 in Albany, New York recently interviewed Ostroff about his groundbreaking work, where he discussed his “secret”—ultrasound-guided…
Dr. Trish Henwood Publishes Article about Using POCUS to Treat Ebola
Emergency physician Dr. Trish Henwood, president and co-founder of the PURE Initiative, has been in the frontlines of the battle against Ebola since 2014, when she traveled to Liberia to confront an outbreak. Dr. Henwood recently wrote an article for The New England Journal of Medicine outlining the lessons she has learned since those extremely challenging days.Dr. Henwood begins her article in the starkest terms: “Half my patients died. They died from one disease, but so many different deaths.” From that sobering introduction, she explains how clinical appearance did not always predict an…