ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Medicine
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1520004
This article is part of the Research TopicOutstanding Advances in Veterinary Diagnostic Ultrasonography: Novel Milestones in Disease Detection, Prediction, and TreatmentView all 13 articles
Abdominal, thoracic, and cardiac point-of-care ultrasound skills following an in-person hands-on training course for early-track emergency clinicians
Provisionally accepted
- 1Colorado State University, Fort Collins, United States
- 2Veterinary Emergency Group, White Plains, United States
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This study was designed to assess baseline compared to three months procedural skills performing abdominal, thoracic, and cardiac point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) after POCUS training. A POCUS training was designed as a 3-hour online course, followed by a 2-day in-person course consisting of 3.5 hours of case-based lectures and 4 hours of hands-on laboratory on anesthetized dogs each day. In-person procedural assessment was performed using an anesthetized dog and consisted of identifying 22 anatomical structures in 6 minutes. The assessment was performed precourse and repeated three months post-course in an identical environment. Fifty-six veterinarians from the Veterinary Emergency Group New ER Doctor program were enrolled. Participants identified an overall 7.8±2.6 structures in the pre-course assessment, compared to 13.8±5.9 in the post-course assessment (p<0.0001). For abdominal POCUS, participants identified 5.9±1.9 structures out of 12 in the pre-course and 9.0±1.5 in the post-course assessment (p<0.0001). For thoracic POCUS, participants identified 1.7±1.2 structures out of 4 in the pre-course and 3.4±0.7 in the post-course assessment (p<0.0001). For cardiac POCUS, participants identified 0.07±0.3 structures out of 6 pre and 1.5±1.6 post-course assessment (p<0.0001). There was no impact of pre-course tested variables on the pre-course score. Survey-based course satisfaction was 100%.The Veterinary Emergency Group New ER Doctor POCUS course improved participants' ability to correctly identify anatomical structures on POCUS when assessed three months after the course.
Keywords: PoCUS, focused ultrasound, competency, Learning, assessment, Performance decay
Received: 30 Oct 2024; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Guillaumin, Cavanagh, Rechy, Callahan and Hanel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Rita Hanel, Veterinary Emergency Group, White Plains, United States
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