Faculty-Focused Perioperative Ultrasound Training Program: A Single-Center Experience

Comprehensive educational initiatives in ultrasound for practicing physicians are lacking. We developed a perioperative ultrasound training program for faculty to offer a broad orientation to the principles and clinical applications of ultrasound.

The program consisted of two phases. Phase one, which introduced ultrasound via didactic and hands-on components, had six live sessions. At the end of each, participants completed a knowledge quiz. During the sixth session, faculty participated in an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE). For phase two, faculty attended two to three sessions (8-10 hours each) of in-depth individualized training and demonstrated supervised performance of ultrasound-related procedures of their choice.

Participants included Anesthesia faculty at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

On average 30 faculty members attended each live session for phase one; 12 completed phase two. There was a significant difference in quiz scores across the six sessions (p < 0.001) with scores for Session 6 being significantly higher than for Session 1 (p < 0.001). The average mean and median scores on the three OSCE stations were 95.63% and 98.33%, respectively. For phase two, the 8 participants who received training in regional anesthesia each performed > 10 blocks on patients over two days; 5 of the 7 participants who received training in transthoracic echocardiography each completed more than 15 examinations on simulators and 10 examinations on patients.

It is possible to implement a departmental educational program for ultrasound to improve ultrasound knowledge and skills in practicing anesthesiologists.