Short training course enhances geriatricians’ confidence, ability in handheld POCUS
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A short training course bolstered geriatricians’ confidence in using point-of-care-ultrasound and enhanced their ability to interpret corresponding images, according to recent trial results.
Penn Medicine researchers noted that older patients typically face barriers to care due to their serious medical conditions and transportation challenges. Portable devices such as POCUS, however, could bring care directly to these individuals in their long-term care facility or their own home.
“With ultrasound devices like these being handheld, they can fit in your pocket, so it's always available to doctors, like a stethoscope," lead author Daniel Kim, MD, a geriatric medicine fellow at UPenn’s Perelman School of Medicine, said in a statement. "But physicians must be confident in their ability to use the technology, which means knowing the clinical indications for its usage and how to position the device to obtain adequate images and interpret them afterwards."
Kim and co-investigators took existing curriculums for training emergency medicine physicians on handheld devices and created a geriatrician-specific course. The four-hour workshop includes hands-on training and supervised scanning sessions.
And for the four fellows who completed their coursework, the initial workshop doubled both their comfort and confidence in using POCUS and interpreting images. Finishing the hour-long supervised sessions, meanwhile, tripled confidence levels.
These figures held true across bladder, lung and internal jugular body regions, but were less pronounced for heart assessments. Confidence in using cardiac POCUS did increase overall, the authors noted, but dropped for heart scan interpretations.
The decline isn’t surprising, they added, given the complexities of cardiac imaging.
Classes were scheduled to run for six months, but COVID-19 forced the researchers to stop sessions three months in. Going forward, Kim and colleagues hope to create a web-friendly model.
“We want to organize a virtual ultrasound webinar workshop and teach others to use a similar model for instruction," Kim said. "We hope that the more people we can get in geriatrics to feel comfortable with this, the more scans we'll be able to do on people who would never have otherwise gotten them."
Read the entire study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society here.
Matt joined Chicago’s TriMed team in 2018 covering all areas of health imaging after two years reporting on the hospital field. He holds a bachelor’s in English from UIC, and enjoys a good cup of coffee and an interesting documentary.