The need for a RASCI ultrasound guided regional anesthesia course.

PATIENTS NEED REGIONAL ANESTHESIA.

            Regional anesthesia used as either as sole anesthetic technique as an alternate to general anesthesia, or as supplement to general anesthesia has three major benefits. Firstly regional anesthesia provides profound and often total analgesia after surgery. Secondly regional anesthesia allows great reductions in the use of opiates. This avoids the risk of opiate induced respiratory depression, nausea, sedation, constipation and itchiness after surgery. Thirdly by a variety of mechanisms and in various patients, regional anesthesia improves post-surgical patients’ outcomes, by reducing pneumonia, deep venous thrombosis, myocardial infraction, peri-operative mortality, limb functionality after limb surgery, and chronic pain syndromes and more.

REGIONAL ANESTHESIA IS HARDly taught in medical schools. 

            Most medical schools teach only extreme barest principals on regional anesthesia to medical students. Most anesthesia residency programs do not teach advanced regional anesthesia at all.  So there are there is a need for many anesthesiologists to learn regional anesthesia.

REGIONAL ANESTHESIA IS HARD TO LEARN

            Regional anesthesia is learned by the novice attempting to self teach from books, with extreme difficulty. Regional anesthesia technique is best learned in “apprenticeship mode” direct from experienced teachers by a sort of “oral tradition” from teacher to teacher.

REGIONAL ANESTHESIA IS HARD TO TEACH

            The teaching situation requires the perfect simultaneous presence of a patient in need of nerve block, a capable regional anesthesia skilled teacher, facilities and equipment to perform nerve blocks and above all the student.  Furthermore there is great potential for disaster from promiscuous blind needle probing in a patient and patient safety concerns limit the repeatability of procedure (practice) in these situations.

THE SOLUTION

            The best solution is to bring students together with experienced teachers using advanced and innovation simulations of aspects of patient therapy and care. This workshop using human model simulations with needles for demonstrations, various plastic and gelatine phantoms to replicate nerves in tissue or skin surfaces, human models to practice ultrasound imaging, and finally an anesthetized animal for real-life nerve block practice that can be indefinitely repeated without risk to any human.