One of the things we hope to share on here are those practical tips people use in day to day practice. There was an obvious spot to start.

This is a post about frustration. It’s a post about humility. It’s a post about annoyance and triumph that shouldn’t be treated as a victory.

It’s about cannulation.

Getting a cannula in the patient can be the most mundane, most satisfying or most frustrating part of a day at work for a kids’ anaesthetist. Cannulation is not just useful clinically. It has an excellent habit of keeping any practitioner from getting too far ahead of themselves, just when they are feeling like the supreme clinician.

Anyone who has worked with anyone else has also seen or heard lots of different tips and tricks that individuals have built into their practice over the years. Of course, if there was a single thing that…

Dr Andrew Weatherall with an introduction to a new type of thing (well, for this site anyway). 

*Ahem* [clears throat].

Well, we finally thought we should try chatting. After much delay we finally sat down and tried recording a chat with a microphone. And then after a much longer delay I have finally spent some time learning what to do with all that noise. All that slightly-too-quick-talking noise.

This effort features me chatting with Dr Alan Garner about those times you need to decompress the pleural space. It seems to be an area where a lot of people have passionate ideas about how and when to intervene. This makes it ideal for a chat, although maybe harder to be definitive about what to do. While Alan makes the argument that many of the disadvantages of tube thoracostomy first solved by the open technique have other solutions apparent in modern practice. However, all…