Intensive care medicine
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Intensive care medicine · Oct 2015
Lung ultrasound training: curriculum implementation and learning trajectory among respiratory therapists.
Guidelines recommend teaching of lung ultrasound for critical care, though little information exists on how much training is required for independent practice, especially for non-physician trainees. We thus aimed to elucidate a threshold number of cases above which competency for independent practice may be attained for respiratory therapists (RTs). ⋯ Our training method allowed RTs to independently perform lung ultrasound after at least ten directly supervised scans. Given that RTs are likely to have less ultrasound knowledge and less clinical know-how compared to physicians, we believe that the same threshold number of scans may be also safely applied to the latter.
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Intensive care medicine · Oct 2015
A novel pump-driven veno-venous gas exchange system during extracorporeal CO2-removal.
Pump-driven veno-venous extracorporeal CO2-removal (ECCO2-R) increasingly takes root in hypercapnic lung failure to minimize ventilation invasiveness or to avoid intubation. A recently developed device (iLA activve(®), Novalung, Germany) allows effective decarboxylation via a 22 French double lumen cannula. To assess determinants of gas exchange, we prospectively evaluated the performance of ECCO2-R in ten patients receiving iLA activve(®) due to hypercapnic respiratory failure. ⋯ Increasing sweep gas flow results in effective CO2-removal, which can be further reinforced by raising blood flow. The clinically relevant oxygenation effect in this setting could broaden the range of indications of the system and help to set up an individually tailored configuration.