Point-of-care ultrasound supports Frimley Park Hospital’s anaesthesia and intensive care departments, guiding procedures and providing bedside diagnostics.
Dr Madan Narayanan, a Frimley Park consultant anaesthetist with international teaching experience, explained: “We use ultrasound for lung and heart scans, vascular access, and to guide injections for regional blocks in hand, arm and forearm surgery. The main benefit of nerve blocks is that we can avoid general anaesthetic, so patients can return home sooner, with longer lasting pain relief. Ultrasound is a simple, non-invasive and easily available protocol that has become a normal part of practice.”
Madan continued: “We use six FUJIFILM SonoSite instruments – an older MicroMaxx®, four S-Nerve® instruments and one X-Porte®. We predominantly use the MicroMaxx in the ICU, and the S-Nerves for simple blocks, enabling us to prioritise the X-Porte for more advanced ultrasound, such as deep nerve blocks, or heart and lung scanning. The X-Porte has a friendly and intuitive user interface; you don’t a need complicated training process to use it, and it is very portable and reproducible, so I always have access to the answers I need at the bedside. The large storage capacity also allows me to store lots of images to use in my teaching and training”
“We’ve never changed from FUJIFILM SonoSite, they support us through and through. Anytime we have a problem, we get an instrument to cover the repair period. The post-sales care is very good for the price, that’s the key difference.”
