Q: Tell us a little bit about your work and how POCUS relates.
I work in a mixed medical and surgical ICU where I frequently encounter a lot of patients with respiratory failure. POCUS helps in identifying the causative aetiology and helps avoid unnecessary CT scans. It also helps in identifying and reducing complications in our ICU procedures. We started expanding our POCUS domains and could identify life-threatening abdominal pathologies at bedside which reduced our need for emergent CT scans. Over the past few years I have got queries from attendings of various departments like Nephrology, Medicine, etc showing keen interest to learn POCUS and implement it in their clinical practice.
Q: Why did you pursue POCUS certification and how did you find the process to be?
I have recently started a fellowship program for critical care at my hospital; I do a lot of bedside ultrasound teaching for my residents and work in a fairly busy mixed medical & surgical ICU involving a lot of heart failure, poly trauma, hollow viscous perforations and a lot of USG guided procedures. So I felt it was incumbent upon me to have my knowledge and skills appraised before I teach. A few of my colleagues do POCUS on the fly and they get by fine, but I felt a formal certification would help me enhance credibility. The certification process for POCUS critical care was fairly straightforward, involving all the routinely encountered domains. The knowledge assessment and image interpretation were very good.
Q: Share a positive message or quote with the community.
As someone who’s witnessed the POCUS revolution transform our ICUs firsthand, I’m continually amazed by how this pocket-sized technology creates such enormous impact. Gone are the days of waiting for radiology reports or transporting critically ill patients to radiology suites. The stethoscope defined medicine’s past century; the ultrasound probe will define its future. Keep scanning, keep learning, keep sharing – because every image you capture brings us one step closer to better medicine for all.
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