Clinical research studyThe rate at which residents learn to use hand-held echocardiography at the bedside
Section snippets
Study populations
The study took place on the inpatient medical service at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, an academic medical center providing both community and tertiary services, between the dates of November 2002 and November 2004. Medical residents rotating on the inpatient services of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center were asked to give informed consent to participate in this study. Those giving consent also completed Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Web-based training program on human investigation and
Characteristics of residents
Five residents who gave informed consent but performed no HCU studies were excluded from the analysis. Two of the residents who had previously spent 2 weeks training in echocardiography were also eliminated from the analysis. Thus, the analysis reported here includes 231 HCU sonographic scans performed by 30 medical residents. None of the included residents had previous training in sonography. The maximum number of studies done by any resident was 22. The residents performed an average of 7.7
Discussion
The results of this study show that, as a group, medical residents with minimal formal training can learn how to perform some of the basic functions of cardiac HCU. The rate of learning achieved by the group of residents is encouraging. Although extrapolation of the regression lines beyond the range of their defining data must be viewed with circumspection, the lines suggest that an acceptable level of skill in performing and interpreting echocardiograms might be obtainable within 20 to 40
Acknowledgment
We wish to thank Sonosite Corporation for helping to defray a small portion of the startup costs associated with this study and for providing the hand-held ultrasonography equipment used in this study.
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