Bedside Scanning Tips with Claire Heslop, MD

Ultrasound Podcast

This week I get the pleasure of sitting down (virtually) with Dr. Claire Heslop, a phenomenal educator and Emergency Physician in Toronto, Canada. We chat about a few of our choicest machine/patient/sonographer optimization tips. Check out the top pearls below:

1. Make sure you have the right probe and have the ultrasound machine in the best setting for that specific exam.
2. Optimize depth
3. Optimize gain
4. Optimize your angle of insonance (angle of the beam relative to the structure you’re scanning. The sound beam should be perpendicular to the thing you’re looking at)
5. Patient optimization –
   1. Position the patient
   2. Remove leads/stickers
   3. Clean up gel
6. Keep your patient informed on what you’re seeing (also, ask them if they want to be informed on what you’re seeing)
7. Think about ergonomics for the ultrasonographer –
   1. Drop the bed rails
   2. Lower/raise patient bed
   3. Place the ultrasound machine in your line of sight.

In other news, we’ve decided to cancel in-person Castlefest this year (2020). We had postponed it from May 2020 to November 2020 in hopes that the pandemic would be less prominent by then. Since this likely won’t be the case, we feel that moving the conference to a virtual platform is the right thing to do.

We’re still working out details on exactly how we’re going to do this, but we do know we will offer it November 9-10th 2020 and the URL for updates will be https://www.castlefest2020.com. If you have already paid for in person Castlefest, you have two options:

1. Full refund
2. We hold onto your spot (and registration) for Castlefest 2021. If you do this, we will give you FREE ACCESS to virtual Castlefest 2020.

More details to follow soon, and if you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to reach out! ([e-mail])