Ultrasound Triage for the Emergency Patient (Swindon)

Rapid assessment is critical when managing emergency and critical care cases. This highly practical course is designed to help you integrate focused ultrasound techniques into the initial evaluation of unstable patients, allowing you to identify life-threatening conditions quickly and support clinical decision-making.

Through a combination of short lectures and hands-on scanning sessions, you will learn how focused ultrasound examinations can be used to assess the thorax and abdomen in emergency presentations. The course introduces key FAST scanning techniques and demonstrates how ultrasound findings can help guide treatment and stabilisation in critically ill patients.

The course is suitable for veterinary surgeons new to POCUS as well as veterinary nurses who wish to develop practical ultrasound skills for patient triage.

Practical sessions will allow you to develop confidence in probe handling, image recognition and systematic scanning approaches so you can apply these techniques in real emergency situations in practice.

Topics to be covered

• Principles of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS)
• FAST scanning techniques: AFAST™ and TFAST™
• Ultrasound assessment of the emergency abdomen
• Rapid evaluation of dyspnoeic patients
• Identification of free fluid, haemorrhage and pleural effusion
• Recognition of pneumothorax and pulmonary oedema
• Using ultrasound findings to support emergency triage and case management