Friday, January 12, 2007

Airway courses

Being that managing the airway is an essential skill in Emergency Medicine - I was wondering if anybody attended one of the following airway courses and would like to make some comments?

The two most popular courses are
The difficult airway course (Walls)
Practical Airway management (Levitan)

I believe one of the most important skills to develop during residency is airway management - anything less than perfect can be catastrophic. I think in addition to our clinical experience with airway management in the ED, it is useful to attend one of the airway courses. Also, an elective at Shock Trauma, either the trauma elective or anesthesia elective is a good way to augment our airway skills.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You know, Levitan wants to be unbiased but he can't help to push his fiberoptic scope a bit. It's nice to have exposure to other airway approaches, but nothing beats doing as many intubations realtime on real people as possible -- OR time, in the code room, whatever. His course is nice, but it is only so helpful when your asthmatic stops breathing...

Michael said...

Levitan gives an excellent course on the airway. The lecture is interactive and the hands-on portion is great. He challenges many of the practices (positioning, cricoid pressure etc). I would recommend it to any EM resident or attending.

Adam said...

Thanks for the comments - I actually took the Levitan course and I think the big advantage is the use of cadavers - seems like the closest to the real thing. I like that he challenges some of the traditions of airway management. The course costs a little more than $1000, but I think is worth it if you feel uncomfort with airway.