Critical Care Minutes

Here is another excellent and thorough resource I found online in the blogger community that reviews several procedures including Central Line Placement, Thoracentesis, Paracentesis, Arterial Line, Lumbar Puncture, etc. The review is not video based but does have very detailed images used to illustrate the techniques as well as nice decriptive explanations. ClinicalCases.org is a free online case-based curriculum of clinical medicine and is one of the most popular medical blogs on internet. A lot of the information may not be relevant to the ICU but it is still a good resource for topic reviews. I would encourage you to browse the site and get your learn on Incidentally, this website has significant input from the Cleveland Clinic and the Case Western Lerner College of Medicine – The blog was developed by Dr. Vesselin Dimov (Internal Medicine, CCF).

ClinicalCases.org was featured in the British Medical Journal and Medscape.com, and was referenced several times in the medical education literature. The project is hyperlinked in the web sites of 11 medical schools in the U.S., Canada and Europe. This case-based curriculum was started by physicians at Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University (St. Vincent/St. Luke) Internal Medicine Residency Program for the purpose of medical education.

Check it out Clinicalcases.org.

Here is a link to the Procedural guides.

Here is a five part series nicely done by an ER resident from University of Chicago that goes over step by step what is requires to place a central line. This is directed towards an ER resident but certainly the techniques can be applied to the SICU as well. This is a good review for the new residents who have may have never seen the inside of the kits and who have never seen a line performed. Soon we will have our own videos and then you might be able to see another way this is done.

Part 1 of 5 of the series is included here: (view the rest on YouTube.com by clicking here) Read more…