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Dr. David B. Goodie, a Specialist Anesthetist with the Fiji Orthopaedic Outreach, recently returned from a weeklong charitable medical mission in Fiji. For this mission, Sonosite lent Dr. Goodie an M-Turbo, which he promptly put to good use at the Lautoka Hospital in Fiji. He writes:

The use of opioids in the ICU and the post-operative period is common, with patients often receiving opioids even after simple surgeries. Though opioids are effective in providing fast pain relief, the side effects of respiratory depression, cough suppression, confusion, drowsiness, nausea, vomiting and potential addiction make the sole reliance on opioids risky.

India and Southeast Asia are home to the endangered Asian elephant, which is rapidly declining in numbers due to poaching and habitat destruction.

Professional sportsmen and women rely on rapid, accurate assessment and treatment of injuries to allow them to regain match fitness and return to the field at the earliest opportunity.

In the last decade there has been a widespread adoption of portable ultrasound in point of care (POCUS) for primary care.

Time is of the essence in the emergency department, where a prompt diagnosis can litreally mean the difference between life and death.

Dr. David Bahner (MD, RDMS, FACEP) is an emergency medicine physician in Ohio. He took a Sonosite ultrasound system along on an expedition to Antarctica.

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. 

Ultrasound is a vital tool for vascular surgeons in the 21^st century. In the following essay, Dr. Fidel Fernández Quesada, a sixth-generation vascular surgeon and associate professor at the University of Granada, Spain, describes the difference that ultrasound has made to his clinical practise, and reflects on what his forefathers would have made of such technological advancement.

To celebrate 20 years of helping clinicians bring ultrasound to the point of care, Sonosite partnered with Canadian NGO Bridge To Health and Uganda's Kigezi Healthcare Foundation

According to the World Health Organisation, much of the world’s population has no access to ultrasound imaging. From the jungles of Panama to the mountains of Nepal, the clinicians that are a part of our Global Health Programme and help bring ultrasound to the point of patient care are our greatest source of inspiration.

According to a study conducted by Harvard researchers, emergency physicians in community-hospital settings that chose to use diagnostic point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) in patient care saved patients, insurance companies, and hospitals significant sums of money, even if the results of an ultrasound did not alter a care path.

An advocate for the expansion of the use of point-of-care ultrasound, Dr. Yasmin Endlich is an anaesthesiologist who practises medicine in Australia and regularly travels to Papua New Guinea to provide medical training to local physicians. Here, she explains why nerve blocks are a crucial tool in a rural anaesthetist’s arsenal:

Ultrasound-guidance has proven invaluable for the regional neurosurgical centre at the Salford Royal Hospital outside Manchester, England.

During recent floods in the southern Indian province of Kerala, the Kerala Flood Disaster relief team sent by Kasturba Medical College, Mani

Dr. Ilyas Tugtekin, a consultant anesthetist from Ulm University Medical Center in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, travels to Kumasi, Ghana to help establish an ultrasound training center for doctors all over West Africa. 

Anesthesiologist Dr. Frances Chow works to bring ultrasound-guided nerve blocks to British Columbia Cancer Agency, Vancouver, BC, Canada. British Columbia Cancer Agency has among the best cancer outcomes in the world, including highest of the G7 countries for childhood leukemia, and second highest survival rates across 67 countries for prostate and breast cancer.[1] 

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.