Category Archives: Airway

Airway, Governance

When Less is More

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Airway management seems like the current flavour. Actually it’s sort of always the flavour. Finally, Dr Alan Garner has something to say about something that isn’t about first pass success – checklists.

At the risk of treading into an area likely to stir up as much passion as first pass success, it’s time to talk about checklists. There’s a new publication out there touching on standardisation and the use of checklists among teams providing prehospital drug assisted intubation that has just been published. You can find it here, although it is not open access unfortunately.

The authors surveyed services that they could identify providing prehospital emergency anaesthesia in the UK and sent them a questionnaire.  43 services participated.  There was a spread of helicopter and road-based services in addition to three ED-based teams representing 75% of UK services. That’s a reasonable sample.

The issue that particularly grabbed my interest was the use of checklists.  Most reported services used checklists, particularly the busier ones. Many services have a longer checklist they use for drugs assisted intubations and another shorter one they use for crash intubations.  But unlike any paper I have seen previously this study gives a lot of detail about the checklists themselves, things like the number of items on the checklist, the wording and formatting.

The thing that caught my eye was the length and complexity of the checklists. To directly quote the study:

“On average, standard checklists contained 169 (range: 52–286) words and 41 (range: 28–70) individual checks.”

That caught my eye because the service I’m working in is a massive outlier when it comes to checklists. Out standard prehospital intubation checklist has 13 items when counted using the methodology from this paper.

This is less than half the items on the shortest checklist reported in the study which had 28 items. That’s startling enough to have another look.

Let’s Look Then…

Checklist 1

First thing that is worth saying is that this is the checklist utilised by our rapid response helicopter service in Sydney. This service does just one thing which is prehospital trauma response within a 30 minute flight time of our Sydney base.  No inter-facility transfers which have a quite different workflow.  In those longer haul operations we use a longer checklist which is this one:

Checklist 2

This checklist has 40 items which places it in the middle of the pack compared with this UK study.  We use this checklist in our Northern Territory and international jet operations where intubation is a less common event for the teams.  Many of the referring sites are small and sometimes have no staff with advanced airway skills. Plenty have no plumbed oxygen systems, relying on bottled gas.  In our international jet operations the staff at the referring hospital may speak limited or no English and getting assistance or additional equipment can be very challenging.  We therefore take nothing for granted and check everything. This appears to be comparable to the reported checklists in the study.

P is for Prehospital

But the study is about prehospital anaesthesia specifically.  Many of the reported services, particularly the HEMS services, are like our Sydney service and conduct only prehospital operations.  Our standard prehospital intubation checklist in Sydney is more equivalent to the “crash induction” checklist mentioned in the study both in number of items checked and word count but we use it for all intubations whether time pressured or not.

So why is our standard prehospital checklist such a dramatic outlier and why do we only have a short checklist that we use all the time? Did we sit down, follow the KonMari method and ask if every individual item on the checklist gave us joy? Well, no.

Before we look at this I should say that I’m pretty happy that our success and complication rates are very good compared with the published literature.  You can see some of this in previous posts about how we measure quality in intubation practice here and here.  So being bad at it and accepting lots of complications is not the explanation.

When your thing does the opposite of what you want it to do

To explain this we need to have a look at how checklists can sometimes hinder what we do.  As checklists have been increasingly adopted in medicine and other safety critical industries the potential problems associated with their use are becoming clearer.  Some of these are cultural – do the teams actually use the checklists in the way they were intended?  Do they use them at all despite an SOP mandating them?  Some of the resistance to checklists has been perception that they are just a “tick and flick” exercise for audit purposes but don’t really improve patient safety.  That they slow things down and get in the way of patient care.  Or that the items on the checklist are not really relevant or the list is too long and onerous.  A level of checklist fatigue can result with personnel hurrying through them without really paying attention or omitting them altogether.

At this point I would seriously recommend having a listen to Martin Bromiley, a pilot whose wife died due to human factors issues during a routine operation.  He discusses what checklists are and are not.

To mitigate these factors checklists need to be short, and the list needs to have only items that both can be omitted by oversight but at the same time are critical to safety.  But I don’t think some of the items on the lists in the study meet these criteria or the issue they attempting to address can be managed in another way by re-engineering the process.

Pursuing Simplicity

To illustrate what I mean 100% of standard checklists in the study had an item to ensure that an IV line had been placed and was patent.  But it is impossible to proceed with a drug assisted intubation without functioning venous access (whether IV or IO).  If you attempt to proceed without having checked this item you will rapidly come to halt anyway.

In other words it is not possible to omit this item whether you check it or not.  So why check it? You are just wasting time.

An example of engineering out a source of error is the oxygen supply.  When I worked in the UK myself years ago we did not routinely carry oxygen to the scene.  You had no control over how full the bottle that came with the ground ambulance was and you needed to check every time.  And the bottles that were available were only 400L which did not last all that long on a mask on high flow in any case.

Our approach is to carry our own 600L O2 bottle to every case, and use it for the intubation process every time.  We checked it either in the morning checks, or after the prior case so we know it is full. So we don’t check it again.

This is another part of shortening the checklist.  If you can check it before the phone goes off do so.  Our checklist is really focused on the factors that we could not do before we met the patient because we did not know who the patient was and what their issues were.

Our checklist aims at optimising the process for that specific patient in terms of plan, positioning, specific drug selection and getting out the right size equipment.  But everything that we could check before hand was already done and we don’t check it again.

You don’t make sure every nut on the helicopter is properly torqued before you depart on a mission because that has already been done, and this should be no different.  Most of the equipment items mentioned in table 3 of the study fall into this category. We check our laryngoscope and ventilator every morning and we don’t do it again on the scene.  We have had no failures of either over the past 13 years.

The only other things we do are check that we have the suction out and the monitoring on – simply because it is possible to proceed without these being in place and both are critical for patient safety.  These are the items that a checklist was really designed for.

Having said this we always carry a copy of the longer checklist that we use in our inter-facility operations.  If we are tasked to another case before we can properly redo our checks, or either of the prehospital team members is just not happy for any reason the team reverts to the full check list although in practice this occurs very rarely.

Getting the Team Onboard

I think it is basic human behaviour that compliance with a process will be better when team members can see that it is just what is required without unnecessary steps.  That the really critical components are captured which protects both the patient and themselves.

But I think that they also appreciate a carefully designed process that has removed the requirement for additional checks by engineering out the possibility of error in the first place wherever possible.  If the whole team is actively involved in process redesign through identifying and eliminating opportunities for error they own the resulting shorter checklist.  They follow it because they know if the item is still on the checklist then it both matters and we could not find an alternative to checking it on the scene.

So in the end we have very high success and low complication rates but with a very brief checklist. But maybe this story is more about empowered teams, and the never ending quest for quality.

And the challenge is always there: does the checklist provide what patients and crew need?  And is every item there useful, or could you have sorted it earlier so you just do the vital bits to get the job done in the moment?

Notes:

Feedback is great because we don’t get better without hearing from clever people. So drop a comment. You might be the person who shows us something we could improve.

That paper again is this one:

Burgess MR, Crewdson K, Lockey DJ, Perkins ZB. Prehospital emergency anaesthesia: an updated survey of UK practice with emphasis on the role of standardisation and checklists. Emerg Med J. Online first: 24 May 2018. doi: 10.1136/emermed-2017-206592

 

 

Airway, Paediatrics

Things that Go Up Kids’ Noses – THRIVE and Paeds

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Nasal prongs seem pretty popular for lots of things these days. So how about their use in kids. There’s a couple of papers out there on its use in the paralysed patient and Dr Andrew Weatherall is here to splice them together. 

Isn’t it supposed to be the kids who stuff things up their noses? Have we just seen them do it so often we started wondering about the possibilities ourselves?

Let’s assume not. It’s more a case of people finally getting around to testing things out on kids when they’ve been running with them in adults for quite some time. This time it is THRIVE and that ever so desirable feature of endless maintenance of oxygen saturations while we get around to the ensnorkelling we’ve planned.

In principle that makes plenty of sense. The normal kid is more likely to rapidly desaturate than the normal adult. Physiology is pretty insistent on that. Plus we know people find paediatric intubation tricky so dropping the stress by avoiding the slide of the plethysmograph tone down that digital scale is probably a worthy pursuit.

So how about we look at two papers examining just this issue – does THRIVE employed in the little people stop those saturations from … not thriving??

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Fancy, nose-cramming air is what we’re dealing with really

Australian Angles

First up is this paper published by Humphreys et al, who work out of Brisbane. They did a small RCT on well kids with 24 in the control arm and 24 receiving 100% THRIVE. The kids fell between the ages of 0 and 10 years of age and are reported in the age groups 0-6 months, 6-24 months, 2-5 years and 6-10 years (with a total of 12 in each age range, meaning 6 in the controls and 6 in the THRIVE group within each age group – got it?)

The routine went something like *induction of anaesthesia* –> pre-oxygenation by doing that whole bag-mask ventilation bit –> the mask disappeared and THRIVE was added or nothing was added –> start the stopwatch.

You’ll note that, like the other paper we’ll mention, this is not about patients who are spontaneously ventilating. That’s a completely different thing.

In this group though the period of the saturations staying up was longer. Across the age groups the extension in apnoeic time was 86.8 seconds (0-6 months), 88.7 seconds (6-24 months), 129.5 seconds (2-5 yeas) and 169.2 seconds (6-10 years).

Right, lock it up. Everyone should have nasal prongs. All the time. It’d stop peanuts ending up there too.

Except there’s more pesky nuance in this paper. Like:

1. It’s not for pre-oxygenation

It’s worth noting that the preoxygenation here was all about face-mask ventilation with a good seal. They added THRIVE after that bit and started the clock. This is not entirely surprising because we know that nasal prongs compromise seals in adults and that’s only more likely with kids.

So if you were thinking that you should set up those nasal prongs from the before time zero, you need to think again. THRIVE for preoxygenation is not something tested here, and you shouldn’t assume it’d be better than good face-mask technique.

2. They didn’t test the duration that it worked for apnoea

All they said was it’s ‘more’. ‘Wait,’ you might say, ‘you mean they didn’t test the thing that was the point of study?’

Well not really because the cut-off was ‘twice the previously noted time to desaturation’. So they tested that they could reach the ‘double or nothing’ limit, but didn’t test the full extension. In the THRIVE groups the average saturation when they stopped the clock was 99.6%.

So I guess be reassured that it was likely to be really a heck of a lot of time.

3. Basic things were part of the procedure

For this study there was a lot of basics being done well. Throughout apnoeic oxygenation they weren’t doing things like airway instrumentation, suction, intubation or, I assume, anything much beyond chatting about the weekend and watching the clock. They did jaw thrust, a basic manoeuvre likely to optimise the impact of THRIVE. So maybe we should remember that all those things we are also interested in were not part of the picture.

And Now an Update from the Swiss

What if you didn’t make your cut-off ‘2 times the other cut-off we knew about’? How long could you go?

Well a Swiss crew with no interest in being neutral on the topic I guess have done a study comparing low flow nasal oxygen (0.2 L/kg/min) with THRIVE at either 100% or 30% FiO2 with 20 in each group. And they found … (wait for it…..) 100% THRIVE prolongs apnoea time.

OK there wasn’t much suspense there really.

Except again it was more subtle, and again cut-off matters. They had a cut-off to terminate on the basis of desaturation, but another at 10 minutes (as in ‘it’s 10 minutes and I’m bored let’s stop because those saturations are still great’) and the 3rd cut-off was if the transcutaneous CO2 hit 65 mmHg.

In the THRIVE 100% group no one desaturated, 4 hit 10 minutes and the other 16 had their nasal prongs ditched when they breached the CO2 target. This actually accords with the other paper where they also found that THRIVE doesn’t achieve ventilation and removal of CO2 in kids.

But at the end of this paper you still can’t say how long apnoea might be extended, at least when it comes to those saturations staying up.

Oh, and a couple of other points:

1. Pre-oxygenation was with face-mask ventilation. Again.

Again the nasal option had no role in the preoxygenation phase. They went with face-mask ventilation until the expired oxygen was 90% or above. Then they started the clock with the chosen nasal prong option going.

2. The other airway things done at the time were … none.

Yep. Once again this was just about the oxygen and the stopwatch. Nothing else was going on.

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I mean this could be a visual metaphor for the need to appreciate their is still colour not just black and white when it comes to THRIVE or it could just be pretty, you choose. 

Let’s Think Clinically

So let’s imagine that we’ve actually got that paediatric patient in front of us. Maybe one who needs to get intubated before we get them out of wherever ‘in front of us’ is.

Let’s agree that maintaining oxygenation throughout is a good and noble goal. It’s not the only goal of course. We’d also like to make sure we make good choices around number of attempts, and for some patients (say the patient with intracranial pathology) we need to think about ventilation.

And we don’t have evidence that pre-oxygenation is aided by having THRIVE in place.

So assuming we’re going to do things standard to modern paediatric RSI like face-mask ventilation for a bit before we get going. There is at least a bit of  a question about whether THRIVE adds a huge amount.

What it undoubtedly adds is the confidence that saturations will stay up. That is something that lots of practitioners, particularly those not regularly intubating kids would find immensely reassuring.

There is a couple of caveats to keep in mind though.

There’s a risk to be aware of with THRIVE that those saturations staying interminably up might encourage tunnel vision on persisting with intubation when it’s not working out. It’s not too hard to imagine the scenario where the tube hasn’t passed straight down, but those saturations are OK so you persist a bit longer, and a bit longer, and now long enough that the airway is becoming traumatised and suddenly you’ve created a problem.

So this might be a cognitive challenge to have planned for in advance – how do you keep yourself to a limited number of attempts before re-evaluating and going to plan B (or C)? Do you make it a personal process or have others in the crew hold you to a maximum number of attempts or maximum duration of looking?

After all, THRIVE is going to get you to 10 minutes probably. But if you’re still conducting open negotiations with the glottic structures at 10 minutes, oxygenation is not the airway problem that should still be at the front of your mind. While you’re there, you might have to think about re-dosing anaesthetic agents too.

And the other key patient group is that one where intracranial pathology is an issue. Letting the CO2 rise for some patients is not a good plan because your TBI patient (as just one example) doesn’t need those cerebral vessels dilating and the intracranial pressure going up. For those patients, a step back to face-mask ventilation, or potentially placing a supraglottic airway,  to re-establish an ability to exchange CO2 is probably a better option.

So THRIVE might be great for some things. But whether it’s clinically better than an approach to the airway where really excellent pre-oxygenation is routine and good practices around face-mask ventilation are established seems like a line ball call.

I mean it’s still way better than a piece of Lego up the nose. But it remains an adjunct to the basic stuff, not a replacement.

Notes:

OK. That first paper is this one:

Humphreys S, Lee-Archer P, Reyne G, et al. Transnasal humidified rapid-insufflation ventilatory exchange (THRIVE) in children: a randomised controlled trial. BJA. 2017;118:232-8. 

The second one out of Switzerland is this one:

Riva T, Pedersen TH, Seiler S, et al. Transnasal humidified rapid insufflation ventilatory exchange (THRIVE) for oxygenation of children during apnoea: a prospective randomised controlled trial. BJA. 2018;120(3):592-99.

Did you want something on nasal prongs and seals? You could try this

Groombridge C, Chin CW, Hanrahan B, Holdgate A. Assessment of Common Preoxygenation Strategies Outside of the Operating Room Environment. 2016;23:342-6. 

or this

Hayes-Bradley C, Lewis A, Burns B, Miller M. Efficacy of Nasal Cannula Oxygen as a Preoxygenation Adjunct in Emergency Airway Management. Ann Emerg Med. 2016;68:174-80.

We’re always interested in other thoughts so feel free to drop a comment.

Airway, intubation, Prehospital Trauma

Just because you can …

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With a couple of new papers landing that touch on the issue of how you provide and measure quality care around airway management, Dr Alan Garner returns to point at big animals that are bad at hiding.

Two new airway papers have come across my desk in the last couple of weeks and I now wish I had waited a bit longer before putting up the last post on first look intubation as a quality measure.

So where to start? Well how about a place where everything is apparently big? Yes, there’s a bit of work just out of Texas which sheds further light on that first look intubation story so that’s where we’ll land.

Chasing Quality

It sounds like they have used RSI for a while but undertook a quality improvement project to try and reduce their peri-intubation hypoxia rate.  The project involved introducing a bundle of interventions described in the paper as “patient positioning, apn[o]eic oxygenation, delayed sequence intubation, and goal-directed preoxygenation”.

The paper provides copies of the protocol for intubation pre- and post-bundle intervention in the on-line appendices so I might just go through them here to see what they did differently.

The first thing is there was an emphasis on positioning in the bundle, specifically head up a bit and ear-sternum positioning.  Lots of goodness here that I strongly support.

The second measure they mention was apnoeic oxygenation.  However looking at the pre- and post-bundle policies it is evident that they used it in both time periods.  In the before period it ran at 6L/min till the sedation was given then it was turned up to 15L/min.  In the post period however it was run at “MAX regulator flow” after the ketamine was administered.  I don’t know about the O2 regulators in Texas but to me this does not sound like they changed anything significant.  I will come back to apnoeic oxygenation later.

For pre-oxygenation in the pre- bundle period they used a NRB mask (with nasal prong O2 as above) in spontaneously ventilating patients (and arrested patients were excluded) but in the post- period the pre-oxygenation had to be by BVM with two handed technique to ensure a tight seal plus PEEP.  More goodness here that warms my heart.

Delayed sequence intubation in this study refers to administering 2mg/kg of ketamine then maximising preoxygenation for at least 3mins prior to administration of the muscle relaxant.  I don’t think this is necessary in all patients but this was the policy in the bundle.

The last thing they did was “goal-directed preoxygenation”.  This refers to having a SpO2 target >93% for at least 3 minutes during the pre-oxygenation phase after the ketamine had been administered.  If they could not achieve >93% the patient was managed with an LMA or BVM and transported.  I think this represents sensible patient selection in that it removes the high risk of desaturation patients from the process.  When you look at the results you need to keep this patient selection in mind. However I agree that in their system this is a reasonable approach to ensure patient safety for which the managers should be applauded.

Show Me The Money

Yes let’s get to that money shot:

Table

I have been banging on about peri-intubation hypoxia being far more important than first look intubation rate for a while now and this data shows really clearly why.

There is no significant difference in this study in either first look or overall success rates pre and post the bundle but the hypoxia rate fell by a massive absolute 41%!  The 16% decrease in bradycardia emphasises just how much difference they made.  The managers of this system and their staff alike both need to be congratulated for this achievement as this is something that really matters.  And the first pass and overall success rates give no clue!

It really is time to drop first look as a quality measure and move on.  You could look at this paper and start wondering if it might even be worth dropping overall success rate too, which is an interesting thought.  Their policy favoured patient safety over procedural success rates by abandoning the attempt if the pre-oxygenation saturations could not be raised above 93%. It looks like it is working out well for the patients.

Oh, Back to Oxygenation

I promised I would come back to the apnoeic oxygenation issue.  I know the authors state that it was part of their bundle, but it was used in the pre- bundle period as well.  Hence there is no data here to support it’s use.

All three randomised controlled trials of apoeic oxygenation in the ED and ICU contexts (see the notes at the end) have now failed to find even a suggestion that it helps (check those notes at the end for links) and there are no prehospital RCTs.  My take is that it is time to move on from this one too and simply emphasise good pre-oxygenation and good process when the sats start to fall – or never rise in the first place like this group did so well.

Overall a big well done to the Williamson County EMS folks and thanks for sharing your journey with us.

Moving Right Along

The other paper comes out of London, where the ever-industrious HEMS group have published a retrospective review of their database over a 5 year period (from 2009-2014). They were looking for adult trauma patients they reached with an initial noninvasive systolic blood pressure of 90 mmHg or less (or where a definite reading wasn’t there, those with a central pulse only) and with a GCS of 13-15.

This gave them a total of 265 patients (out of a potential 9480 they attended). 118 of those underwent induction of anaesthesia out there beyond the hospital doors (though with exclusions in analysis they end up with 101 to look at) and the other 147 (that number dropped to 135 on the analysis) got to hospital without that happening.

Now the stated indications for anaesthesia listed are actual or impending airway compromise, ventilatory failure, unconsciousness, humanitarian need, patients unmanageable or severely agitated after head injury, and anticipated clinical course.

Now given that the inclusion criteria includes patients having a GCS of 13-15, it seems like both unconsciousness and those really impossible to handle after head injury are likely to be pretty small numbers in that 101. Even airway compromise, ventilatory failure and humanitarian need seem like they’d be not the commonest indications in that list that would apply to this patient group, though they’d account for some.

I guess it’s possible the patients were all initially GCS 13-15 on the team’s arrival but deteriorated en route, though I just can’t sift that out from the paper. Plus if that was the case it seems like you’d say that.

The Outcomes

In their 236 study patients, 21 died and 15 of those were in the ‘received an anaesthetic’ group. The unadjusted odds ratio for death was 3.73 (1.3-12.21; P = 0.01). When adjusted for age, injury mechanics, heart rate and hypovolaemia the odds ratio remained at 3.07 (1.03-9.14; p = 0.04).

Yikes, sort of.

What To Make of That? 

I guess we should make of it that … things you’d expect to happen, happen? Intubating hypotensive patients and then adding positive pressure ventilation in the prehospital setting is potentially risky for patients for a variety of known pharmacological and physiological reasons that the authors actually go into.

So the question is why embark on such a procedure where you know the dangers in detail? You’ve have to really believe in it to end up wiht 101 cases to follow up.

It feels like there’s an elephant in the room to try and address by name. I wonder if it has something to do with a practice I observed while working in the south-east of England 8 years ago. It relates to that last category “anticipated clinical course”.

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Hovering elephant heads. They’re real.

The concept here is that if you figure the patient is going to be intubated later on in the hospital, you might as well get on and do it. Except the data here suggests that, much like you’d expect, you probably shouldn’t get on and channel your inner Nike marketing script.

Just because you can does not mean you should.  This paper really drives this home though it doesn’t really seem to come straight out and say it. It does pass the comment that “Emergency anaesthesia performed in-hospital for patients with cardiovascular compromise is often delayed until the patient is in theatre and the surgeon is ready to proceed.” Perhaps the problem isn’t using the phrase “anticipated clinical course”. It might be that you just have to remember that the anticipated course might best contain ‘risky things should probably happen in the safest spot’ in the script.

Compare and Contrast

The process of undertaking emergency anaesthesia because later the patient might require emergency anaesthesia is pretty much the complete opposite of the approach from the Williamson County EMS folks. They erred on the side of patient safety and withheld intubation if it was associated with unacceptable risk.

This paper demonstrates that emergency anaesthesia in patients with a high GCS but haemodynamic instability is associated with higher mortality.  We should probably be glad the authors have made this so apparent, because this is probably as good as we’re going to get. We’re not going to get a randomised controlled trial to compare groups. No one is allowing that randomisation any time soon making this another example of needing to accept non-RCT research as the best we’ll get to inform our thinking.

Patients with hypovolaemia due to bleeding need haemorrhage control. The highest priority in patients with that sort of hypovolaemia would seem to be getting them to the point of haemorrhage control quicker. And delaying access to haemorrhage control (because the prehospital anaesthesia bit does add time in the prehospital setting) when the patient has a GCS of 13-15 doesn’t seem to prioritise patient safety enough. Patients probably need us to adjust our thinking on this one.

That seems like common sense. The retrospective look back tells us pretty conclusively it’s a worse option for patients. And now it’s up to us to look forwards to how we’ll view those indications for our next patients. And “anticipated clinical course” probably just doesn’t cut it.

 

Notes:

That hovering elephant head was posted by James Hammond in a Creative Commons-like fashion on unsplash.com and is unchanged here.

How about all those things that got a mention above that you should really go and read for yourself?

Here’s that whole bundle of care paper out of Texas:

Jarvis JL, Gonzales J, Johns D, Sager L. Implementation of a Clinical Bundle to Reduce Out-of-Hospital Peri-intubation Hypoxia. Ann Emerg Med. 2018;doi:10.116/j.annemergmed.2018.01.044 [Epub ahead of print]

Those RCTs of apnoeic oxygenation in critical care environments mentioned are these ones:

Caputo N, Azan B, Domingues R, et al. Emergency Department use of Apnoeic Oxygenation Versus Usual Care During Rapid Sequence Intubation: A Randomized Controlled Trial (The ENDAO Trial). Acad Emerg Med. 2017;24:1387-1394.

Semler MW, Janz DR, Lentz RJ, et al. Randomized Trial of Apnoeic Oxygenation during Endotracheal Intubation of the Critically Ill. Am J Respir Crit Care Care Med. 2016;193:273-80.  

Vourc’h M, Asfar P, Volteau C, et al. High-flow nasal cannula oxygen during endotracheal intubation in hypoxemic patients: a randomised clinical trial. Intensive Care Med. 2015;41:1538-48.

And that paper on the hypotensive, awake prehospital patients scoring an anaesthetic is this one:

Crewdson K, Rehn M, Brohi K, Lockey DJ. Pre-hospital emergency anaesthesia in awake hypotensive trauma patients: beneficial or detrimental? Acta Anaesthesiol. Scand. 2018;62:504-14.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Airway, Governance

Cobras and the First Look

3 Comments

Dr Alan Garner has been here before, asking whether we’re asking the wrong questions when we try to measure quality advanced airway care. Here’s a fresh bit of research that adds to the discussion.

Unintended consequences would hardly be a new thing in medicine or in any other endeavour.  Here is one of my favourite examples taken from Wikipedia (look we all go there from time to time):

“The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. This was a successful strategy as large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward, but eventually enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, they scrapped the reward program, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse, becoming known as the Cobra effect.”

Check this link for some more cracking examples.

Avid or maybe even occasional readers who chanced to come back at exactly the right moment might recognise that I have previously expressed my doubts about reporting the first look intubation rate as a quality measure for intubation.  Have a look here for the previous post.

Now where might you go to find a basket of cobras these days? Well I have just spotted a new paper published in Prehospital Emergency Care which fits the bill.  You can find the full text here. I guess we’d better start picking up the snakes.

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It’s probably a friendly one, right?

Let’s Start with the Headlines

This paper is a look at a ground paramedic system in a small US city (Spokane in Washington State) where the paramedics have used muscle relaxants for more than 20 years i.e. you would have to consider this a mature system.  It appears to be a well supervised system and paramedics have a minimum number of intubations they must successfully perform each three-year certification cycle in addition to a well-structured training regime.

Superficially the system appears to be working well.  They had a 95% success rate and 82% first look success.  Although 95% overall success rate is below par compared with other systems world-wide, all patients not successfully intubated were successfully managed with a supra-glottic device.  That should be OK, right? That probably means the primary focus is on managing the airway to achieve the goal that really counts – oxygenation. And that first look rate of 82% seems quite respectable compared with reports from other systems.  So not a star system but safe enough if these were the only quality measures you were looking at.

Let’s Get Our Hands Right Amongst the Snakes

The thing is the paper also reports physiological data captured by the patient monitor during the peri-intubation period and this tells a very different story.  Much of the data is not that surprising.  Desaturations were more common when patients were being intubated for respiratory pathology and were also related to the highest SpO2 achieved at the end of pre-oxygenation.

How about we look at some oximetry data highlights?

  • Oximetry data was available in 110 cases. Peri-intubation desaturation occurred in 47 cases (43%) and in 32 (68% of the desaturations) it was severe (<80%).
  • The median nadir was 71% and median duration was 2 minutes. Among cases with any desaturation, the time in the unhappy valley was at least 2 minutes in 46% of cases with first-attempt success and in 100% of cases requiring multiple attempts.
  • Although the frequency of desaturation was significantly higher in cases requiring multiple laryngoscopic attempts versus a single attempt (70% vs. 37%; p = 0.01), 70% of all desaturations occurred on first attempt intubation success. Only 11% of desaturations were reflected in the EMS patient care report.

Heart rate changes

  • 13% became bradycardic, 7% profoundly. The median SpO2 nadir during bradycardic episodes was 30% with median duration of nearly 5.5 mins.
  • Sixty percent of bradycardia events occurred on first-attempt intubation success.

Yes in the multiple attempt cases the desaturations were worse than cases requiring a single attempt.  But given the very high rate of desaturation events in this study is reporting the first pass success rate providing any meaningful quality data?  Is there subtle pressure placed on the paramedics in this system to achieve first pass intubation at the potential expense of desaturation events, by the very fact that first pass rate is being reported?

We can’t be sure and I’ll put my hand up and say “yes, I’m inferring a little bit from what we can see in the paper”.  But clearly the overall success and first pass success rates provide no real indication of process safety in this particular EMS system.  It is only in reporting of clinically meaningful quality data like desaturation that we see the real safety performance.

Who Else Thinks This?

To quote the paper itself “What may be obscured by this focus on the risks associated with multiple intubation attempts is the large absolute number of physiologic derangements occurring on first-attempt success. In our study, 70% of all desaturations, 60% of bradycardia episodes, 63% of hypotension episodes, and one of the two cardiac arrests occurred on first-attempt success.”  That’s really the nub of it and it’s excellent work by the authors to make sure that’s right up there in the discussion.

The authors conclude that first attempt success “is not a reliable indicator of patient safety.”  The authors specifically note that prolonged duration of first pass attempts is a contributor to the desaturation rate and that prolonged attempts might be “a consequence of lack of awareness of the passage of time during an intubation attempt, or lack of awareness of the occurrence of desaturation”.

But is the very fact of reporting first pass success rate a subtle psychological contributor too?  The authors clearly agree with me here when they comment “prolonged desaturations on first attempt success could be an unintended consequence of the focus on first-attempt success itself and the common use of first-attempt success as a primary measure of intubation quality.”

Maybe it’s an example of the Cobra effect.

The Take Home Bit

Prospectively it is right to set yourself up to get the ETT in the right place on the first attempt and with minimal complications.  However once the intubation attempt commences the emphasis needs to shift to prevention of complications by reacting to physiological changes as they occur.

We want to encourage this.  I want my teams obsessed with preventing complications, not first pass success.  Why are we reporting a process measure as a quality indicator when it might well be having the perverse effect of encouraging those very complications we were trying to remove?  The system I work in here in NSW requires us to report first pass success.  I remain hesitant to do this as I don’t want to signal to my teams that this is actually something that matters.  I would much rather them be proud of the 0% desaturation rate that we have for intubation over the last 9 months – that is really impressive.

 

Notes:

That paper is this one:

Walker RG, White LJ, Whitmore GN, et al. Evaluation of Physiologic Alterations during Prehospital Paramedic-Performed Rapid Sequence Intubation. Prehosp Emerg Care. 2018; https://doi.org/10.1080/10903127.2017.1380095

And the link to that first post covering similar ground is right about here.

The image of the cobra came via Creative Commons off flickr and is unchanged from the post by Luca Boldrini.

 

 

 

 

Airway, intubation, Paediatrics

Old School/New School – Updating Classic RSI

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Respect for the classics doesn’t mean being stuck with them. Here’s a refresher on why you might not want to do RSI like they used to by Dr Andrew Weatherall. This one is a cross post picked up from the paeds anaesthesia site he chips in on, www.songsorstories.com 

Everything in medicine needs the occasional reboot. I mean not as often as Hollywood thinks we need to reinvogorate a superhero franchise but at least every now and then. Sometime that’s because we learn new things (cross reference here). Sometimes it’s because our perception of what is the biggest risk changes (more on that in a second). And sometimes we suddenly realise that the original reason something became fixed practice might not have been a thing in the first place.

Which brings us to RSI, a classic so many of us have grown up with.

What is this thing?

The story of RSI starts with excellent intentions (and for this version of events I’m leaning heavily on this review by the excellent Thomas Engelhardt). In this case the idea was to come up with a safer way to get the snorkel in the all important windpipe as quickly as possible to try and minimise the risk of things that should stay nestled in the gastrointestinal tract might find their way to the lungs.

And you can understand why. Serious aspiration can, sometimes, be deadly. The first piece of the puzzle was written up by Morton and Wylie way back in 1951 who described where with the patient sitting up the anaesthetist would give intravenous barbiturate then muscle relaxant and rapidly intubate them. A rapid sequence of induction and intubation. So really it’s RSII.

8 years later a description emerged of a thiopental/relaxant/40-degree head-up tilt foot-down tilt. It wasn’t for another 2 years that cricoid pressure popped up (thanks Sellick) although interestingly it included not just a bit of pre-oxygenation but also some bag-mask ventilation prior to putting the tube in.

It was another 2 years before the other classic bit of RSII became popular, with an exhortation to avoid bag-masking because of the perceived risk for gastric insufflation and hence regurgitation.

A classic technique derived from a series of “what abouts” and “I reckons”. I mean, you wouldn’t read about it. Except you just did.

That’s not to say that medicine doesn’t have space for a bit of logical derivation of good ways forward. It might just suggest that the whole approach is open to a refresh.

Re-evaluating the Likely

If the technique was designed to prevent aspiration, maybe we should start with looking at how likely this event is in a setting a bit more modern than 1951. In 1999 the epic writing team of Warner, Warner, Warner, Warner and Warner looked at 56138 patients under 18 having procedures (elective or emergency) over 12 years to see just how big this problem was. This covered 63180 procedures.

The time frame for defining aspiration was entry into the operating room until 2 hours post-anaesthetic. To score the label there had to be direct identification of bilious secretions or particulate matter in the tracheobronchial tree or new X-ray findings after an episode of regurgitation.  A total of 24 patients met the criteria.

11 of those were emergency cases so the rate in that group was 1 in 373 compared to 1 in 4544 in the elective cases. 21 of the 24 were around induction. 15 of the 24 had no symptoms develop despite the aspiration. 5 of the other 9 did need respiratory support of some kind and 3 of them needed ventilation for more than 48 hours. Well the paper says that but actually describes ventilation for 18 days, 14 days and 33 days in those cases.

And there’s the rub. It’s really very impressively rare. But then when it goes bad, the downside can be very, very down.

So fine, let’s prevent the bad thing. We’d better get on with the classic old RSII, right?

Remembering the Even More Likely

The problem with being so rigorously focussed on avoiding pulmonary aspiration that you do things like not help the patient breathe, is there are other basic functions that don’t get looked after so well. Like oxygenating.

Gencorelli et al looked at episodes of desaturation during RSI while describing the classic drugs/cricoid/no ventilation technique. Across 1070 children included they reported a 3.6% rate of desaturation to 89% or below (1.7% of the patients being in the under 80% group). Not surprisingly the under 2s were more likely to have a desaturation.

These rates are low of course and certainly lower than in some other areas of practice. Reports from emergency departments have indicated desaturation rates anywhere from 14% to 33% (with the latter reporting rates of desaturation of up to 59% in the under 2s).

So amongst the various things we’re trying to do to prevent the 1 in 400+ event are we at risk of failing on another key thing. You know? The oxygen provision thing.

What’s the alternative?

Neuhaus and team subsequently described very well their approach to RSII, which they badged as cRSII (where the “c” is for “controlled” not some other “c” word like “cheese” which wouldn’t make sense anyway but would be a good reminder that cheese is great).

They key features for them (putting to the side “lots of preparation”):

  • 20 degrees of head up (though they say only for the over 2s)
  • Suction any NG in situ.
  • Give the drugs.
  • Avoid cricoid pressure (with a few exceptions).
  • Provide gentle facemark ventilation with peak pressures of 12cmH2O.
  • Neuromuscular monitoring to ensure the muscle relaxant has really, really worked.

This last point makes a heap of sense as active regurgitation is a problem created by airway instrumentation when you don’t have adequate anaesthesia and paralysis.

cRSII
It’s a big list.

Talk is cheap though, what were their results?

They report on 1001 patients They had a moderate hypoxaemia (89-80%) rate of 0.5% and a severe hypoxaemia (< 80%) rate of 0.3% and the 8 patients this represents had a median age of 0.8 years. They had 1 patient with regurgitation but no evidence of aspiration.

That’s pretty impressive.

Putting it Together

So if we accept that we should really try and optimise oxygenation, and that the risk of this is higher than the risk of aspiration then we have to accept that modifications to that original technique are reasonable. What are a few steps for practically putting it together?

1. Assess that risk of a full stomach

It might well be that we’re going to avoid cricoid most times, but there are still a few situations where that risk of aspiration is probably higher. In the Neuhaus paper they suggested achalasia, Zenker diverticulum or post-colonic interposition patients (done for oesophageal replacement) always need cricoid.

It certainly seems worth having heightened concerns in the patient with significant increases in intra-abdominal pressure.

2. Everyone sits up

Why wouldn’t you have a bit of head up? It makes sense if you’re avoiding passive regurgitation and is a good position for pre-oxygenation, facemark ventilation and intubation. I’m not quite sure why some authors have suggested the under 2s shouldn’t be head up. This is a routine option.

3. Have that suction handy

Goes without saying maybe, but I’m saying it.

4. Pre-oxygenation, but not with distress

Yes you want to pre-oxygenate. And most times you can talk kids through that and get a full 3 minutes in. Some kids will only get more distressed with oxygenation though, and insisting on pre-oxygenation only guarantees distress. Given that you’re going to apply gentle face-mask ventilation, it’s rare you need to go to the wall on this one.

And while I’m there what about apnoeic oxygenation? Well, as discussed in this post, the evidence that’s available in kids isn’t so persuasive as to suggest it should be routine. The stuff that has been done showing extended apnoeic time actually followed effective pre-oxygenation with face-mask ventilation. So as we’re going to put that tube in quickly after the same sort of effective face-mask ventilation, extending apnoeic time for minutes seems not that clinically relevant.

5. Cricoid yes or cricoid no?

Again this is a judgment call. I know plenty of anaesthetists who still prefer to start with it but with a low threshold to remove it. I’m more likely to mostly err on the side of not using it, except for those high risk of aspiration patients.

If you are going to use it, it is worth noting that, particularly in infants, the trachea is quite often more prone to distortion by cricoid pressure than you realise. Doing flexible bronchoscopy work you’re sometimes asked to manipulate the airway and I’ve seen the whole trachea get substantially compressed and distorted by seemingly innocuous manipulation. Distort it enough and you can increase the resistance to air going in and out enough to make it easier to get down to that stomach.

In addition, as covered very nicely in this review, cricoid relies on the alignment of trachea and oesophagus and the evidence is that in kids < 8 years old 45% had displacement of the oesophagus so you’d be unlikely to get compression of the oesophagus even with perfectly delivered cricoid (at least on the CT scanning mentioned).

So for the very high risk ones I’d tend to start with it (well start with it once I’m sure the kids won’t react to it going on), but that leaves almost everyone where I would’t be too concerned. And if it is on, I’d be quick to take it off if it was impeding either view or tube passage.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Maybe I included this picture of an echidna because they have a reputation for being good at waiting and not because it’s a prickly situation.

6. Wait

We’re going to take our time with face-mask ventilation and maintain oxygenation. So where’s the extreme rush getting the tube in? Being too obsessed with that step, even though you’re achieving oxygenation, is a way to end up instrumenting the airway while the patient is only lightly anaesthetised or inadequately provided with paralysis. What was that thing we’re preventing again? The regurgitation thing that’s worse if we get going while the kid is lightly anaesthetised? Oh, right. Slow down.

The description suggests using a nerve monitor. I can’t say this is routine myself, but once the muscle relaxant is onboard I do publicly note for the team I’m working with how long we’ll be waiting on the clock before we start trying to intubate. (“The clock says 09:30 now. Once it ticks over to 09:32, we’ll start with the intubation.”)

I then remind everyone that this will take an unnervingly boring period of time and they might want to come up with a good joke to fill the time.

7. Ventilating

Yes, this is a thing that’s necessary because kids desaturate quickly. Particularly the younger ones. Achieving gentle face-mask ventilation relies on really good technique with the bag in hand. Plus it’s very therapeutic to gently squeeze that bag.

7. What about parents?

This one also needs an assessment of what might help and what won’t. For lower risk kids, as a paediatric anaesthetist doing it regularly, I’d be comfortable having them along. But if it was the sort of case that was likely to be difficult, or if I was back at the training junior doctor stage, there’d be no dilemma for me. I’d tell the parents that they wouldn’t be coming in. Having them alone to help their child relax (not always a guaranteed result of having parents in) has some advantages. But the prime job is safe management of the peri-induction period. And that might mean less people around.

 

So those are the simple things that have shifted over the course of my time in the big wide medical world. It’s a realignment of the priorities in a way that makes the ‘R’ in ‘RSII’ look smaller and smaller so that the oxygenation is placed at the top of the tree.

Put together though it’s a reboot worth endorsing. I mean the 60s just weren’t that great, surely?

 

Notes:

How many bits that are really important aren’t covered here? There must be some. So leave a comment. We’ll all learn.

And if you like the post and other things around the joint, maybe throw your email in the relevant spot so you’ll get an email each time a new post pops up.

This post is a cross-post from another site that this Weatherall bloke works on called Songs or Stories. It’s about paediatric anaesthesia.

That echidna pic came from flickr’s Creative Commons area and is unchanged from Duncan McCaskills’s post.

Now to the literature, because going to the direct papers is always rewarding.

That review by Engelhardt where he makes it clear what he thinks is this one:

Engelhardt T. Rapid sequence induction has no use in pediatric anesthesia. Pediatr Anesth. 2015;25:5-8. 

The paper by the anaesthetic equivalent of the Brady Bunch or something I assume is this one:

Warner MA, Warner ME, Warner DO, Warner LO, Warner JE. Perioperative Pulmonary Aspiration in Infants and Children. Anesthesiol. 1999;90:66-71. 

The benchmarking study is this one:

Gencorelli FJ, Fields RG, Litman RS. Complications during rapid sequence induction of general anesthesia in children: a benchmark study. Pediatr Anesth. 2010;20:421-4. 

The emergency department studies mentioned in passing for their demonstration of high rates of desaturation are these ones:

Long E, Sabato S, Baby FE. Endotracheal intubation in the pediatric emergency department. Pediatr Anesth. 2014;24:1204-11.

Rinderknecht AS, Mittiga MR, Meinzen-Derr J, Geis GL. Kerrey BT. Factors Associated with Oxyhemoglobin Desaturation During Rapid Sequence Intubation in a Pediatric Emergency Department: Findings from Multivariable Analyses of Video Review Data. Academic Emergency Medicine. 2014;22:431-440. 

That paper looking at controlled techniques in kids is this one:

Neuhaus D, Schmitz A, Gerber A, Weiss M. Controlled rapid sequence induction and intubation – an analysis of 1001 children. Pediatr Anesth. 2013;23:734-740.

And that other review is this one:

Newton R, Hack H. Place of rapid sequence induction in paediatric anaesthesia. BJA Educ. 2016;16:120-3.

 

 

Airway, Practical Things

I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now: Simple Airway Management

6 Comments

This is a popular series and it’s not hard to see why. Greg Brown drops back in to talk about the airway device that is now his go to item. 

I clearly remember a time when the escalation of airway management in prehospital care resembled the fabled Underpants Gnomes from South Park and their three step plan to making a profit.

Back then, airway management looked something like this (and yes there were four steps, not three like in South Park):

  1. Patient’s own airway – bummer; that’s no fun for anyone.
  2. Oropharyngeal airway (aka the Guedel) – fun but not that inspiring.
  3. Endotracheal tube – break out the high fives, it’s a good day to be a medic.
  4. Needle cricothyroidotomy – if an ETT doesn’t do it, a 14 gauge cannula in the throat ought to fix it. Then there are the mutual backslaps.

Back in the day when I was new to military prehospital care (and at a time where not much was happening in the world) the focus seemed to be on big ticket items and not the purpose of the interventions. Indeed, it seemed to me that the drug of choice for any airway problem was plastic; and the bigger the problem, the smaller the dose.

What I know now is that the one’s choice of procedure must consider a whole lot more than just self-gratification. Airway problems are generally either an oxygenation or a ventilation issue, and the choice of procedure must take at least this into account. However, the purpose of this post on the Collective is not to discuss the differences between CICV and CICO (nor the relative advantages of DL vs VL) but simply to discuss basic airways.

Simple Is As Simple Does

There is no doubt that a patent airway that was issued to the patient at birth is best for the patient. Therefore, it goes without saying that anything that can be done by the treating professional to maintain a patent natural airway should be at least considered. I am not going to go into how best to clear an airway and position a patient as there are a myriad of reputable sources out there for you to conduct your own research but I will make two important points:

  1. In a perfect world the “ideal” position will align (and therefore open) the upper airway; seemingly minor changes in positioning can have significant detrimental impacts on airway potency (and vice versa); and,
  2. If you don’t know how to position a patient or provide manoeuvres then you might want to consider taking a step back and booking into a first aid course. Quite quickly. Like right this second. Just do it ….

Still here? Good then, on with the show.

Which means it’s time to introduce one of the heroes: a simple artificial airway. To Guedel or not to Guedel? For many years that has been the question, and the oropharyngeal airway (OPA) was definitely my plastic of choice. Simple to insert and effective – two of my favourite things in a medical device. But are they deserving of their historical gold medal for simple airway adjuncts? Well, maybe yes and maybe no.

You see when it comes to simple adjuncts I have become, over the years, a massive fan of the nasopharyngeal airway (NPA). I would argue that they are just as simple to use as their orally inserted cousins – the operator just needs to be trained in their use. And whilst there are pros and cons to all medical interventions in my mind the NPA has one big benefit over the OPA – when (if) the patient starts to rouse the NPA can stay in, a handy thing for those pesky patients whose level of consciousness ebbs and flows.

Over the last ten years the NPA has gained popularity amongst first responders with thanks to support from some international heavy hitters, and not before time. You see, the NPA was actually invented before the OPA – 38 years earlier, in fact, by Joseph Clover of the Royal College of Surgeons (he later became a founding member of the Royal College of Anaesthetists) in 1870. The first OPA was designed by…. wait for it… Frederic Hewitt in 1908. The first “Guedel” was not even invented by Arthur Guedel whose name is now synonymous with the device. He didn’t enter the scene until the 1930’s (but I will grant that he made huge improvements to Hewitt’s rudimentary designs).

However, it was not until 2002 and the widespread introduction of Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) in militaries worldwide that the NPA started gaining favour once more. With thanks to a push from the United States Department of Defense’s Special Operations Command, NPA’s started making their way into the individual first aid kits of soldiers, sailors and airmen employed in combat operations. Indeed, by 2008 every Australian serviceperson employed in combat roles carried an NPA in a pouch alongside appropriate haemorrhage control devices. NPA’s are now taught as part of C-TECC guidelines (the civilian version of TCCC) and are now commonly the first artificial airway device reached for by those employed in first responder roles worldwide.

Table

Are there risks associated with the of an NPA? Well, this is medicine, isn’t it? Of course there are risks. The big one that everybody immediately jumps to is in the patient with suspected basal skull fracture (or a fracture of the cranial vault). The risk in inserting an NPA here is that the tube may indeed enter the cranial cavity instead of heading into the nasopharynx. But a review of the literature reveals only two cases where this occurred thus making it a rather extreme reason to be afraid of using an NPA. (Note: that same review of the literature also revealed an article advocating the use of nasopharyngeal airways in the treatment of watery diarrhoea…. Four words: single use only please!)

Putting It To Work

So how do you utilise an NPA (and I’m talking about as an airway device, not in treating diarrhoea of any consistency)? Well firstly, size matters. I am sure that at some point you, like me, have taught various methods. The first common method is to look at the diameter of the patient’s pinky finger – in theory, this is the same diameter of the nares (nasal openings). Therefore the NPA of choice should be the diameter of the patient’s pinky. Yes?

Alternately, the second common method of sizing pertains to length – in theory the distance from the nostril of choice to the tragus (that flap at the front of the ear where it meets the cheek) is the same as from the tip of the nose to the upper pharynx. Yes?

Well, research by Roberts et al in the EMJ found that a combination of the two methods is required to get reach NPA nirvana and that in fact the patient’s height was a better determinant of requisite NPA size. They used data from MRI scans to determine that, all things considered, the law averages reigned supreme. Average height male? Size 7.0mm Portex NPA. Average sized female? Size 6.0mm NPA. Or, you could await the rollout of the MRI App on your smartphone of choice…

Once you have selected the correct size NPA you simply pick the largest nostril, lubricate the outside of the NPA (the patient’s saliva is usually sufficient) and insert whilst aiming for the patient’s ear (the same side as the nostril you are using). By aiming for the ear you are pushing backwards, not upwards, thus reducing the risk of the NPA entering the cranial vault in that patient with a suspected basal skill fracture. For this reason the presence of a suspected basal skull fracture has relegated to the status of relative contraindication (no longer an absolute contraindication). If any significant resistance to insertion is felt then the attempt should be aborted and the other nostril attempted.

Be sure to consider how you will secure the NPA. Certain members of society have naturally wider nares and I’ve seen them inhale their NPA. Placing a large safety pin through the shaft of NPA just below the flange decreases the chances of this happening, but in most patients I’ve treated the safety pin has not been necessary.

 

So there you have it – another thing that I know now that I wish I knew then is that the NPA is not an evil device guaranteed to lead any patient who has ever experienced a blow to the head on a one way trip to the morgue. Rather, the NPA is now my simple airway of choice, an intervention that I have used countless times both on battlefields and in emergency departments, and is the only airway device that I carry on every single job. Oh, and it also has some purpose in treating patients with watery diarrhoea…apparently.

 

Notes:

Remember if you like things on this site there’s a box somewhere where you can throw your email address so you get a regular email when a new post hits.

Want to know about how your choices of airway adjuncts can affect ventilation? Then go here.

Interested in reading more about the facts and myths of NPA’s? Try this.

Here’s a cool little video about airway manoeuvres and simple adjuncts from that good crew at Life in the Fast Lane.

And a previous post that included the use of NPA’s in the tactical environment can be found here.

 

Airway, Paediatrics

The Dangerous Little Details

8 Comments

A new bit of research is out looking at paediatric intubation in the prehospital and retrieval setting. Picking it up and turning it this way, that way and all around, here’s Dr Andrew Weatherall. 

Advanced prehospital practitioners that I’ve met have some pretty common traits. They are pretty comfortable around things that other people might find chaotic. They often have pretty strong opinions on food and coffee. Not necessarily even on good food either. I’ve been given connoisseur-level education on various take away options. Most importantly, they are appropriately bananas about doing a good job for their patients.

That extends to paediatric patients which is obviously excellent. Except we tend not to do our most excellent work when it comes to kids. The reasons for that could fill many a blog post (and maybe we’ll get back to that another time) but kids tend to get less pain relief when faced with similarly painful situations, less interventions even when they’re indicated and we tend to do those procedural things less well.

In 2011 Bankole et al. compared interventions in kids (defined as < 12 years old) and adults with a head injury and a GCS < 15 in New Jersey (there was 102 patients in the kids group matched to 99 adults with equivalent injuries).  69.2% of the kids had some sort of problem with intubation. That was across failed intubation (29.03% vs 2.27% in adults), tube dislodgement (16.12% vs 2.27%), wrong-sized tube (7.45% vs 0%) and multiple attempts (as in over 3 tries) at intubation (6.45% vs 2.27%). A peripheral IV was there in 85.9% of adults but only 65.7% of kids.

In a paper that also commented on relative intubation rates in advanced EMS vs general EMS in the Netherlands, Gerritse et al also commented on analgesia. In their study 77% of kids who really needed some form of analgesia actually received nothing from the general EMS. No kid under the age of 4 received any form of analgesia from the EMS. Not one.

I’m not quoting those papers to say anything other than good practitioners (I have a predisposition to think most of those working at any level of EMS are people trying to do the best job their system and training allow) find kids extra difficult. This patient group provides an additional challenge on top of the storm you already deal with the scene. Like someone started blasting fairy floss into your eyes in the middle of that storm. OK I’m not sure that was the greatest analogy but it’s happened now so maybe we can just agree to move on while also remembering that when you’re a kid fairy floss is pretty great. Mmmm, fairy floss.

Enter the Swiss, purveyors of good chocolate and cheese with holes, with some interesting work that sheds a little extra light on things that even the most advanced practitioners find challenging about little people and airway management.

Let’s Stop and Check the Scenery

Not the mountains or lakes or Large Hadron Collider scenery, the other scenery.

Appearing in SJTREM, the paper comes from a  look at their database between June 2010 and December 2013. Across their 12 bases and one affiliate base they do around 11000 prehospital or interhospital missions per year with their paramedic-doctor teams. I should point out that these advanced teams really have had good training in airway management and specific paeds time. The study looks at any kid under the age of 17 requiring any airway manipulation (not just intubation or supraglottic airway or tracheostomy but bag-mask ventilation as well).

From their pool of 4505 paediatric patients over the 3.5ish years (which if they’re doing around 11000 jobs per year should be around 11-12% of their total workload) the ended up with 425 kids requiring some sort of airway care (9.4% of the paediatric group). A little over half (225) were prehospital cases. From here on in when we talk about intubation it’ll be about prehospital missions because those moving between buildings were already intubated and ventilated.

So what did these top operators find?

Actually It’s Not About the View

In the 215 patients for whom an attempt at endotracheal intubation was attempted, first-pass success was 95.3%. Now, if you’ve dropped by this blog before you might recall Dr Alan Garner discussing whether this is the most important measure. I think that’s a great post, but I don’t think it is meant to be interpreted as “first pass intubation tells us nothing” (Alan can always correct me).

What this number does say is that the challenges in kids aren’t necessarily about getting a view of the cords that is enough to achieve intubation. Only 10 patients (4.7%) were described as inflicting a difficult airway management scenario on the team. 98.6% eventually ended up with a support snorkel in their trachea.

There were 2 children who could not be intubated and ended up oxygenating very nicely with the aid of a supraglottic airway, while one patient with a known “airway issues syndrome” (Goldenhar’s syndrome) couldn’t be either intubated or ventilated but was already at the end of a prolonged arrest situation.

So for advanced EMS providers, maybe it’s not the getting a view/passing the tube part of the procedure that is really at issue. In our own research that touched on this, the intubation success rate was 98.7% of the paediatric patients were successfully intubated while one patient was managed with a laryngeal mask in the prehospital phase.

This fits with the overall truth of paediatric airways: unanticipated difficult laryngoscopy is less common in kids than adults.

So Where’s the Problem?

The problems with paeds airway intervention here are about the details. You may have noticed that people who do subspecialty work in paeds can be a little bit fanatical about details. There’s a reason for this. A smaller airway is less forgiving of the tube that is the wrong size, be it too big or too small. An endotracheal tube that is 1 cm too far in on your 1 year old is proportionally a lot closer to the carina than when the same situation applies to an adult. Add a little flexion or extension and that whole tube can end up visiting new pockets of the bronchial tree.

This is the part that is really well covered in the Swiss study. In the 82.7% where intubation was noted, 82.5% got an adequately sized tube. It was too shrunken to be appropriate in 2.9% and too gargantuan in 14.6% (in the under 1s that rose to 57.5%). Rates were higher if that tube was placed during a CPR scenario.

The depth? Well, if you went off the formulae often mentioned in dispatches, most insertions were deeper than that. And while I can’t seem to find the bit in the results that clarifies this statement, the authors say in the discussion that “Only the placement of the depth marking of the correct Microcuff ET tube … for age between the vocal cords was accurate for all paediatric patients …” (Not familiar with the markings? You could look at an earlier post on this site, here.)

 

Details, Details

I think this is the key message of this study. Lots of things might make you sweat about paediatric airways. I suspect that for most practitioners it is the view and “plastic through the cords” components that cause the stress.

That bit is important, of course, and everyone wants to do that bit well. This study supports the argument that advanced practitioners already do that bit really well. Perhaps in thinking keenly about that bit it’s attention to some details, the sort of details that kids are pretty unforgiving about, that gets in the way of safer paeds airway management.

Stavros Markopoulos
Look at this butterfly. Gets fuzzy on the last few details of the right wing and can’t even butterfly properly.

Things to Take Away

Any research only reveals a very particular part of a story. There are questions left unanswered or things that don’t quite apply to your practice. That doesn’t mean we can’t use those results to reflect on things we do when we deliver our variant of advanced care.

So I’d say there are a few key things suggested by this study:

  • If you’ve trained in paediatric airway management, chances are the intubation itself (at least the getting a view and passing the tube bit) will go well.
  • Really well trained people still find the details challenging. The wrong tube size and the wrong depth of insertion matter in these patients.
  • It might be time to review whether those old formulae are the best option.
  • Knowing your equipment (like where the line on the tube goes) is pretty worthwhile.
  • The tube through the cords isn’t where attention to detail stops. That’s not the moment to ease up.

So we can all get out there, push through the fairy floss, be confident that we’ll get those endotracheal tubes in and start remembering the little details that will produce perfection.

No more fuzzy butterflies.

Notes:

Of course it’s not the fault of the butterfly it’s right wing looks fuzzy. It’s the photographer. Well, actually it’s an amazing photo where the wing is a tiny bit in a different alignment. It’s from flickr Creative Commons via Stavros Markopoulos and is  unaltered.

The source paper link is right here and it’s open access:

Schmidt AR, Ulrich L, Seifert B, Albrecht R ,Spahn DR, Stein P. Ease and difficulty of pre-hospital airway management in 425 paediatric patients treated by a helicopter emergency medical service: a retrospective analysis. Stand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med. 2016; 24:22. 

I also mentioned a paper we put out there:

Barker CL, Weatherall AD. Prehospital paediatric emergencies treated by an Australian helicopter emergency medical service. 2014; 21:130-5. 

Then there’s the Bankole et al. paper:

Bankole S, Asuncion A, Ross S, et al. First responder performance in pediatric trauma: A comparison with an adult cohort. Pediatr Crit Care Med. 2011;12:e166-70. 

And finally the Gerritse et al. paper which is also open access:

Gerritse BM, Schalkwijk A, Pelzer BJ, Scheffer GJ, Draaisma JM. Advanced medical life support procedures in vitally compromised children by a helicopter emergency medical service. BMC Emerg Med. 2010;10:6.

Addit: After a really helpful comment from Paramedidad the line “In their study 77% of kids who really needed some form of analgesia.” was fixed to read “In their study 77% of kids who really needed some form of analgesia actually received nothing from the general EMS.” 

 

Airway

The Elephant in the Room: Airway Stuff for Non-Intubators

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Tim Wallace, emergency nurse, midwife and flight nurse from the Top End, returns to the blog with a different look at a popular topic – airway management. 

Some stuff to ponder for the non-intubators…

 Do you routinely assess, plan and prepare for airway issues in patients with a risk of airway compromise?

Could you honestly say you would be able to reliably manage A and B on your own?

Who does the work?

Emergency airway and ventilation management is routinely performed by a group of providers that it would be reasonable to call airway non-experts. This group includes paramedics, nurses, lifeguards and community first responders. Amongst these individuals there is significant variability in initial & ongoing training, experience and exposures to relevant simulated and actual airway/ventilation management.

A 2011 audit using data from 16 US states (Wang et al table 1) reveals 23% of interventions that could be classified as ‘critical care’ level, and while it is impossible to determine the skill level of the providers who performed the other 77%, it is reasonable to assume that they were not all critical care clinicians.

Conversely, the narrative and evidence base is dominated by the group who probably perform the lowest volume of work (the intubators). While I’m not arguing that we’ve heard the final word on interventions like pre-hospital RSI, I figured it was time to talk about the non-intubators, which for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to limit to paramedics and nurses – not necessarily novices and not necessarily inexperienced.

Whilst I have ignored endotracheal intubation (ETI) and those trained to do it as any casual observer will recognise the internet is bursting at the seams with content on advanced airway management. At times I get the impression from the blog/social media world that intubation (with ketamine) is some kind of panacea. If we glance over at the situation for our “occasional intubator” (typically medical or paramedic) who performs between 1 and 50 people per year (Reeves & Skinner 2008), there is  acknowledgment of and significant controversy in the state of affairs around procedural success and risk.

I think it’s reasonable that we apply the same scrutiny to the non-intubators.

Really Simple Things

Simple airway management and bag-valve-mask (BVM) ventilation are simple yeah?

I’ll try to avoid the term ‘basic airway management’ because I don’t really think it’s very basic; positioning, manoeuvres, suction, BVM, oral and nasal airways etc. I’ll also chuck in intermediate-advanced airways like LMAs (laryngeal mask airways) as we are generally all trained and expected to use them if required. 

Despite how these skills are represented in many courses and the common fallacy within the health system that completion of an Advanced Life Support course confers reliable competence in advanced life support (alluded to by Kidner and Laurence, 2006), it turns out in the hands of the less skilled/experienced operator, it can be very difficult to achieve airway control and maintain ventilation. Anaesthetists don’t really represent basic airway management as basic, so the rest of us probably shouldn’t either.

The Literature and BVM

Unsurprisingly, Walsh et al (2000) demonstrated anaesthetists were better at BVM ventilation than other doctors, supporting the notion that training, experience and exposures matter when it comes to this skillset. The evidence-based consensus (e.g. Otten et al, 2014) is that 2 handed (versus 1 handed C-grip) BVM technique is superior. However, while 2-person BVM (outside the OT) should be the stated aim, this is not an option on a nurse-only retrieval or in the back of a moving ambulance. Interestingly, in this experiment subjects with more experience bagging people in emergencies did not perform better than inexperienced subjects, though you would imagine this might change if you introduced a toothless bearded man with down syndrome into the mix.

In Noordergraaf et al’s useful 2004 study on real (anaesthetised) people, fire-fighters with 3 hours training on airway/ventilation management attempted to maintain airway patency and deliver BVM ventilation. Up to 23% of the time, they could not maintain an airway using BVM, simple manoeuvres and adjuncts. Additionally, half the time the patients received ineffective ventilation.

In 2011, Adelborg et al evaluated professional life-guard resuscitation performance, comparing mouth to mouth/pocket mask and BVM ventilation. Noting that amongst some lifeguards it was “common sense that BVM [was] superior” (despite the fact that it wasn’t a mandatory part of lifeguard training), their results demonstrate that this is probably a flawed assumption.

Finally, the Finns revealed ‘basic airway management’ for what it is, amongst a cohort of new/clinically inexperienced paramedics, who were allocated a cardiac arrest scenario utilising either BVM, LMA or ETI management after initial training – the group that achieved the poorest ventilation (and by inference airway control) were in the BVM arm! (Kurola et al 2004).

That’s OK, these days we don’t even bother with BVM …

The literature generally suggests LMA devices (v BVM) are easier to learn to use and are superior for airway control / ventilation with a number of people pretty much advocating canning the BVM and going straight for a LMA. Rechner et al (2007) showed that Critical Care Nurses with one hour of training on LMA insertion were able to maintain airway control and ventilate children 82% of the time using LMAs compared to 70% using BVM/adjuncts. Further, utilising LMAs (as opposed to BVM) in initial airway management of cardiac arrests appears to protect arrestees from gastric aspiration (Stone, Chantler, Baskett 1998).

However, while LMAs are undoubtedly the shizz and minimally experienced providers can generally insert them easily enough while supervised in the OT or during manikin simulation, success with this device does not appear to reliably carry over to the real life setting e.g. Hein et al 2008 with 65% success within 2 attempts during out of hospital cardiac arrest.

Now here’s a few useful acronyms I first came across at Life in the Fast Lane:

Difficult BVM = BONES

  • Beard
  • Obese
  • No teeth
  • Elderly
  • Sleep Apnea / Snoring

Difficult LMA = RODS

  • Restricted mouth opening
  • Obstruction
  • Distorted airway
  • Stiff lungs or c-spine

I was at a recent conference ‘show and tell’ type talk from a representative of a very high-performance paramedic based EMS system. Amongst other things, he talked about the level of audit and scrutiny applied to pre-hospital RSI performed by his service. At the end I asked if they audited the airway interventions/management of their non-RSI accredited providers (no). Realistically this group of providers will still be called upon to manage A and B, and when they do it’s likely to be because there is no backup available – I’m picturing a patient in some kind of extremis. Due to the clinical characteristics of this patient group (cardiac arrest, neurological emergencies, respiratory decompensation etc.), I’d imagine that if there was a negative outcome, it may be difficult to trace it back to a failure of some basic intervention in the kind of way you could if they were performing intubation +/- RSI.

In an methodologically dodgy study conducted by me (2016), non-physician providers (n=I can’t remember), were asked “if you were by yourself and had to bag someone, would you be confident that you could do it successfully?” The responses were generally polarised reflecting unflinching confidence in their abilities or cautionary pessimism that they would give it their best shot but were not optimistic – one told me “if they were honest with themselves most people would ”. This observation appears to mirror the findings of Kidner and Laurence (2006), who evaluated the basic airway and ventilation competence of junior doctors (n=20) on anaesthetized theatre patients. While pre assessment 85% said they were confident in their ability, only 40% demonstrated initial competence to the minimum standard.

Mr Tusko copy
I’d imagine some of my colleagues with smaller hands might be concerned about getting a good seal on Mr Tusko.

 

Where do you work?

There is a certain irony in our office at work. Over the way in aviation, our pilots are becoming more skilled and experienced almost every shift undertaking high risk, single pilot operations day and night. Yet they still have high volume training and re-currency requirements. Arguably, if they crash the plane we’re all screwed, but I’m not the first person to articulate the idea that we medical people have some lessons to learn from aviation. Raatiniemi et al (2013) have some suggestions about how to rectify the current state of affairs (from a setting that has practical similarities with EMS operations in rural and remote Oz):

– targeted airway management courses (not that such a thing actually exists!)

– simulation and manikin training

– supervised hands on time in OT (probably the gold standard)

– registering / auditing procedures to target training and supervision.

Care to Read More?

Here’s a good blog post on two v one person BVM and some other BVM stuff.

Flavel and Boyle’s excellent 2010 LMA vs BMV is worth a read (the full reference is below).

Additionally, Dr Aaron Conway’s research project “Survey to improve the quality of the training and education that nurses receive about conscious sedation” is worth pondering for the non-airway experts and I imagine the results of this study will provide an important contribution to this discussion. Check it out in detail here. 

Now the bibliography:

Adelborg, K., Dalgas,C.,  Lerkevang Grove, E., Jørgensen, C.,Husain Al-Mashhadi, R., Løfgren, B. (2011) Mouth-to-mouth ventilation is superior to mouth-to-pocket mask and bag-valve-mask ventilation during lifeguard CPR: A randomized study. Resuscitation 82, 618–622.

Flavel, E, Boyle, M. (2010) Which is more effective for ventilation in the prehospital setting during cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the laryngeal mask airway or the bag-valve-mask? – A review of the literature. Journal of Emergency Primary Health Care. 8(3)

Hein C, Owen H, Plummer J. (2008) A 12-month audit of laryngeal mask airway (LM) use in a South Australian ambulance service. Resuscitation;79:219–24.

 Kidner ,K. Laurence, A. (2006) Basic airway management by junior doctors: assessment and training on human apnoeic subjects in the anaesthetic room. Anaesthesia, 2006, 61, pages 739–742

Kurola, J. Harve, H. Kettunen, T., Laakso J.-P. Gorski, J. Paakkonen,H. Silfvast, T. (2004) Airway management in cardiac arrest—comparison of the laryngeal tube, tracheal intubation and bag-valve mask ventilation in emergency medical training Resuscitation 61 149–153

Noordergraaf, G, van Dun, PJ, Kramer, BP, Schors, MP, Hornman, HP, de Jong, W, Noordergraaf, A. (2004) Airway management by first responders when using a bag-valve device and two oxygen-driven resuscitators in 104 patients. European Journal of Anaesthesiology, 21(5)

Otten, D, Liao, M, Wolken, R, Douglas, I, Mishra, R, Kao, A, Barrett, W, Drasler, E, Byyny, R, Haukoos, J (2014) Comparison of Bag-Valve-Mask Hand-Sealing Techniques in a Simulated Model. Annals of Emergency Medicine, 63(1)

Raatiniemi L1, Länkimäki S, Martikainen M. (2013) Pre-hospital airway management by non-physicians in Northern Finland — a cross-sectional survey.. Acta Anaesthesiol Scand. May;57(5):654-9

Rechner JA, Loach VJ, Ali MT, Barber VS, Young JD, Mason DG. (2007) A comparison of laryngeal mask airway with  facemask and oropharyngeal airway for manual ventilation by critical care nurses in children. Anaesthesia. 62:79.

 Stone, BJ., Chantler, PJ, Baskett, PJF. (1998) The incidence of regurgitation during cardiopulmonary resuscitation: a comparison between the bag valve mask and laryngeal mask airway Resuscitation 38 3–6

Walsh K, Cummins F, Keogh J, Shorten G  (2000) Effectiveness of mask ventilation performed by hospital doctors in an Irish tertiary referral teaching hospital. Irish Medical Journal 93(2)

Wang, H., Mann, N., Mears, G., Jacobson, K., Yeal, D. (2011) Out-of-hospital airway management in the United States Resuscitation, 82 (2011) 378–385

Airway, Paediatrics, Uncategorized

Getting Things Straight

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Lots of beliefs are hard to shake. Andrew Weatherall covers one from the paediatric airway – the holy status of the straight blade.

As I’ve mentioned before, paediatric airway management is full of mythological beasts. Some of that is about anatomy stuff and the like. Some is about equipment. Plenty is about technique. Sometimes it’s about technique and equipment together. Bliss.

So this is where I wade into another topic in paeds airways:

Straight blades are overrated and you should throw them away.

Marc Zimmer Dog Unicorn Dog
It is a time for mythical beasts. Like the fabled unicorn dog but less cool.

Do we need big bins?

Well, actually no. Stop the indignant letter writing. When I say they’re overrated I don’t mean they have no value. They have a role like most items of equipment that are still in use after nearly 100 years probably still have a role.

What I do mean is that straight blades are treated with a reverence in paediatric airway management that is unwarranted, while curved blades like the Macintosh seem to be described as “bigger people’s airway devices”. Trainees could easily go through their whole training period thinking that you must always use straight blades for patients who understand what the hell Pokemon are all about.

That just isn’t true. People who swear by straight blades will point to the more anterior epiglottis and the angle of the cords to argue the case for their chosen device just as convincingly as those who like a curved blade point out that they get more working space in the mouth and a familiar blade and both will be sort of right.

It might be useful to dive into this a little more. So let’s work through a paper from 2014 that specifically looked at the straight vs curved blade question. Partly because it gives an appropriate ‘meh’ when trying to split the two options but also because it highlights how myths can dominate our perception of the original work.

 

Welcoming the Contenders

The paper here appeared in Pediatric Anesthesia in 2014 (I touched on this in the other post). The authors set out with a useful question: is there a difference between Miller and Macintosh blades when it comes to ease of obtaining a view and success of intubation in the 1-24 month age range?

They looked at well kids having elective surgery under anaesthesia where muscle relaxation was also used. They included 120 kids and each kid had laryngoscopy with one device then the other.

The results are a case of a big old shrug, which is sort of OK. Easy laryngoscopy was noted in pretty much the same percentages. First pass success pretty much the same. The rates of one being better for the view than the other were pretty much the same. When it was difficult with one view the rate of switching to the other and finding it was easier was about the same regardless of whether you had started with the Macintosh or Miller.

So the two blades that stepped into the ring step out with no knock out punch thrown. There are a number of other interesting points when you look in more detail though and a few comments I’d make in passing.

  1. The epiglottis isn’t the endpoint

I have this impression that trainees get really obsessed needing to pick up and control the epiglottis with a straight blade. In this paper the routine use of the straight blade was to place the tip in the vallecula. In only 2 of the 60 uses of the Miller blade did they pick up the epiglottis.

Why do people get so antsy about picking up the epiglottis? It was only ever described as one of the options to obtain the view, not the only option. Those early designers never forgot the aim: to obtain a view to let you instrument the trachea.

Here’s Miller from the paper where he described his blade:

“The epiglottis is visualized and raised slightly to exposure the cords or, if the operator desires, the tip of the blade maybe placed in front of the epiglottis and raised sufficiently to visualize the cords after the method of Macintosh.”

In fact Macintosh described the straight blade being used in this manner when he reported on his own design, singling out Dr Margaret Hawksley as an exponent of this technique. The authors of this recent paper further point out that it’s a lot more stimulating to pick up the epiglottis. That’s worth at least a thought.

Miller wasn’t precious about how you get the view. The idea that picking up the epiglottis is the only technique just got repeated enough that no one remembers to question it. The epiglottis isn’t the main game. The view is the thing.

  1. Make sure of your basic technique

One of the other interesting features here is that there are some elements of the intubation technique that seem like they could do with a review. An example: the Miller blade was advanced centrally along the tongue. This is a technique taught by heaps of people and I think Miller probably would have strong feelings about that. Again let’s go back to the paper:

“The blade is inserted in the right side of the mouth, pushing the tongue to the left.”

One of the bigger challenges in getting a view in paediatric patients is getting the tongue out of the way. This is particularly for straight blades which tend to have less of a flange to do some of the work for you. I’m not the only one who thinks so, either:

“On passing the instrument into the mouth the tongue should be manipulated to the left side, away from the slot; otherwise the organ may roll into the barrel and completely obstruct the view.”

That was Magill. In 1930. Now Magill might have been describing the use of a speculum but the principle is the same. The tongue is only likely to make your view worse (and given that straight blades pose an additional challenge in having not as much space proximally to work in, that really matters).

Magill went on to point out that if you struggled at all you could move the proximal end of our instrument further to the right corner of the mouth – that’s also known as the paraglossal view and turns out to be pretty much the best way to go.

In other basic technique points the authors of this recent paper mention that laryngoscopy was done with the head in a neutral position. This doesn’t seem like optimal head positioning for use of either blade, and that’s another point worth keeping in mind.

  1. It’s useful to know what the intended use was with your instrument of choice

In this paper and in the comparison with the Cardiff blade they refer to as an example of other “blade vs blade” papers, a comment is made that when you introduce an endotracheal tube centrally you can compromise the view and that it’s not great for introducing your tube via any central channel.

Miller, again:

“The scope is used for visualizing the cords only. One should work outside the blade to insert the tube. The only criticism of the instrument has been that it is too small through which to work. It was not designed to be used as a guide for the catheter.” (That’s the author’s work with the italics, not an edit from me.)

In fact Miller searched for a new design because he felt small laryngoscope blades on the market were too big. It’s designed to be small.

So yes, you need to use a technique where you bring the tube in from the side. That was always the point.

  1. Should we stop talking about external laryngeal manipulation like it’s an extra?

This is really a bit of open musing on my part. This was done in over 50% of the patients in both groups and generally helped when it was used. I can see how the precision of description goes up when we include these details but it strikes me as so much a part of every intubation (as this external pressure means less work for the laryngoscope itself) that I wonder how much it adds to our appreciation of clinical use. That’s one for the comments section I guess.

Messages for the Prehospital or Retrieval Type

After sifting though all of that, what are the take home messages? Well, here are some from me that might need additions from others:

  1. Know what you do and why you do it

Those picking up a laryngoscope for the little people need to have thought through what they will use and why. If I’m offered a personal preference it is to use a curved blade for everyone. Even as a paeds anaesthetist I’ve just used a curved blade more. It’s better designed to control that pesky tongue. You get a huge working space within the mouth and with external laryngeal manipulation (which I’d call standard) you can pretty much always bring the airway into view, even in the slightly anterior larynx.

I haven’t seen a study that would confirm this hunch, but I wonder if one of the problems some prehospital clinicians have with paeds intubation is they pick up a laryngoscope they didn’t really learn, very rarely use or rehearse with and don’t really understand. You need to focus your technique slightly differently with a straight blade. Add the stress of the situation and is it any wonder the job becomes harder?

I’d back the occasional proceduralist as more likely to intuitively understand the anatomy using the same sort of blade they always use. I doubt it’s a study that would be easy to set up in anything but mannequins though.

  1. Know the different options

That preference for people using what they know doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn both. This study did highlight that some kids just have a better view with a particular blade. You can’t quite get as good a view with one option, switch to the next and all of a sudden it’s easier. Again though if you’re reaching for that other option use it right.

  1. Make your technique appropriate for the 1% and the 99% will be fine

This is more of a general point. Laryngoscopy in infants is easy the vast majority of the time. So if you don’t bother controlling the tongue you’ll probably get by most times. It’s the 1% where your routine practice of not getting the tongue out of your view, or being able to aim for either the vallecula or epiglottis, or positioning the head right will start to bite.

If you always do everything to maximise your view, you’ve already got a good technique for the 1%. It’s best not to need to review your technique once the blade is in and you’ve figured out this is the tough one you’ve been dreading.

So after all that, maybe paediatric airway instrumentation comes down to a really simple refrain: the tool in the hand matters less than the tool holding it.

 

Notes:

That image comes from Marc Zimmer on flickr under Creative Commons and is unaltered.

Here’s the paper mentioned again:

Varghese E, Kundu R. Does the Miller blade truly provide a better laryngoscopic view and intubating conditions than the Macintosh blade in small children? Pediatric Anesthesia 2014;24:825-9. 

And the others …

A review on the popularity of the Macintosh blade:

Scott J, Baker PA. How did the Macintosh laryngoscope become so popular? Pediatric Anesthesia 2009; 19 (Suppl 1):24-9. 

Miller RA. A new laryngoscope for intubation of infants. Anaesthesiology 1946;7:205-6.

Macintosh RR. A new laryngoscope. Lancet 1943;1:205.

Magill IW. Technique in endotracheal anaesthesia. British Medical Journal 1930;2:817-20.

and the Cardiff paper:

Jones RM, Jones PL, Gildersleve CD, et al. The Cardiff paediatric laryngoscope blade: a comparison with the Miller size 1 and Macintosh size 2 laryngoscope blades. Anaesthesia, 2004;59:1016-9.

 

 

Airway, Paediatrics

Does video make for little airway stars?

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Most of us are always out for new techniques to make difficult cases easier. Videolaryngoscopy is one area of great change over the last decade. Here Andrew Weatherall looks at videolaryngoscopy as it relates to looking after the little kidlet airway. 

Seeing is believing. It can happen in a moment in sport. It’s the whole basis of magicians plying their trade.  Even people seeing mysterious circles appearing in crops want to believe.

Perhaps that impulse is why everyone wants to believe in videolaryngoscopy. And it makes sense. It’s persuasive. The view is better than your eyes alone. It must be better.

And yet … the evidence doesn’t help us back up our gut reaction. So the debate starts. It’s a pretty big debate too. Too big for here.

So let’s just talk about one bit. Let’s see where videolaryngoscopy fits in with kids.

Open Bias

I should declare an interest here. I like videolaryngoscopy. I work in operating theatres where it’s freely available. In our prehospital operation we use it as routine. This is not to say I don’t dig direct laryngoscopy. I just really like an intubating experience that’s a little more IMAX. That isn’t even because I’m particularly a gear junkie. I’m only interested in tech if it helps me do a better job looking after patients.

So what’s so great about videolaryngoscopy? It’s not the view that it gives. It’s the team that it gives. My subjective experience is that when taking on a  slightly challenging airway the greatest benefit of using videolaryngoscopy is that all members of the team managing the airway can appreciate what is going on.

Sharing the same vision is the quickest way to get everybody operating on the same page. It’s particularly beneficial in getting any airway assistant providing external laryngeal manipulation to line up the view in the best possible way.

These observations are the same ones that colleagues who are fans of videolaryngoscopy seem to make. They note some drawbacks too. (blood in the airway being the obvious one). More and more though, videolaryngoscopy is perceived as the go to option for the extra few % that makes intubation a sure thing.

So does the evidence match that perception? And if not, why not?

What’s the Problem?

Perhaps it’s worth remembering that difficult intubation in kids isn’t that common. Some of the morphological changes that might be associated with difficult intubation are relatively common on their own. Restrictions to neck extension, a small mouth and jaw, a big tongue and dysmorphic appearance may be associated with difficult intubation. Of course most with these features still have a straightforward intubation.

A team from Erlangen published a retrospective review not that long ago looking at this issue. Looking back over a period of 5 years (while excluding records that were incomplete or where intubation wasn’t relevant) they ended up looking at 8434 patients who had a total of 11219 procedures.  152 (1.35%) of direct laryngoscopies were classified as difficult laryngoscopies (grade III or IV views).

1.35% isn’t much. Note also that they are talking about laryngoscopy, not actual intubation or airway management. Certain surgery groups had a relatively higher rate (oromaxillofacial and cardiac surgery patients) as did kids under the age of 1. The wash-up is that if we were to choose videolaryngoscopy to help with difficult laryngoscopy, we’re choosing that for < 2% of the population. This choice is fine but we at least need to understand the size of the problem we’re trying to address.

The 2% is something like the size of one of the eggs vs that ginormous bug.
The 2% is something like the size of one of the eggs vs that ginormous bug.

The Numbers For VL

Well they’re in and they’re not particularly supportive of the idea that videolaryngoscopy in kids is vastly better. Here’s one study where Truview PCD and Glidescope didn’t help with the view and slowed things down. Here’s another small series where the Glidescope doesn’t necessarily help with the view.

Of course rather than keep picking out individual studies, we could try to take on board the evidence from a meta-analysis. Sun et al have done the hard work, looking at fourteen studies which had a randomised component to their study.

Their findings? Videolaryngoscopy generally improved the view of the airway in kids with normal airways or potentially difficult airways. However the time to intubation was longer in pretty much all groups. Interestingly, the rate of failure was much higher with videolaryngoscopy (there was lots of heterogeneity in the included studies so that particular finding probably needs more than a few grinds of the giant salt mill).

Cochrane has a review specifically in neonates which is useful … to demonstrate that there’s not enough useful evidence.

What Don’t the Studies Say?

Well it already looks like the answer is “much”. Perhaps this is what I take away from them.

1. The evidence doesn’t justify a move away from direct laryngoscopy

I think videolaryngoscopy is still best considered as a technique to use as an adjunct, building off really good direct laryngoscopy technique. If the spiel is that VL “improves your view by one Cormack and Lehane grade” then implicit in that is the assumption that your view was already optimised.

For the vast majority of patients who have a grade I/POGO 100 laryngoscopy, videolaryngoscopy can’t improve your view (obviously). However you may reach the same view with slightly more ease. This applies particularly to videolaryngoscopy options that build off a standard laryngoscope design (rather than the Glidescope for example which has its own special learning curve).

Wouldn’t logic say if you need to work less to achieve grade I, II or even III views, your technique runs the risk of becoming reliant on the extra % that videolaryngoscopy gives you? For video laryngoscopes that operate pretty much like standard laryngoscopes with a little bit extra, you need your technique with direct laryngoscopy to get you most of the way there. The “video” bit is for the last few percent.

So good training in direct laryngoscopy techniques remains vital.  Practitioners will still need to understand the difference in technique required for different laryngoscopes and what the implications are for patient positioning to optimise success rates.

2. More nuance in the research would be helpful

Meta-analysis relies on the contributing papers. There’s presently a bit of heterogeneity there, including in the level of experience in those using the devices. Follow-up studies (or just fresh studies) when people have become highly used to videolaryngoscopy would be an interesting addition to the literature – how long does proficiency take to develop?

What about managing the unanticipated difficult airway case? That seems to be a whole area that isn’t well addressed by the current literature. Or measurement of decision-making and overall management of the airway when videolaryngoscopy is available?

There’s also a tendency to focus on clumps of trees rather than the whole forest. This is pretty common to airway papers. Often the focus seems to be on ‘time to tracheal intubation’ (which isn’t the worst surrogate to choose) or, less productively, on the view of the glottis or first pass success. This touches on the same territory discussed by Alan Garner here on measuring surrogates rather than clinically meaningful parameters.

Seeing the glottis more doesn’t equate to the airway being managed.  First pass success isn’t the most vital of measures. Time to tracheal intubation from laryngoscope in hand might be a little more helpful, but is it more useful than time from induction to airway secure in the patient with a difficult airway? Should we be reporting on desaturation rates with one technique over another given that the aim of airway management isn’t just the bit of plastic?

3. Measuring teams

The other feature the literature doesn’t inform is that subjective sense of utilising the team better in difficult airway management. It would be really interesting to see some research that examined the impact of videolaryngoscopy on the ways teams worked together or communicated in the management of the airway. Or what about performance of teams managing the airway in out of theatre locations? As things stand the thing I subjectively feel is the best feature of videolaryngoscopy doesn’t seem to have been evaluated.

 

So where does that leave me? Not really anywhere different. Probably where it leaves me is in need of checking my own position on the seeing vs believing spectrum.

In the absence of evidence from other people I should probably rigorously examine my personal practice. Practice the use of different techniques until I feel proficient. Then measure my actual performance and see what my own benchmark performances are. Perhaps really rigorous personal auditing (not the Scientology version) is the next step in understanding how VL should fit into my practice and how it measures up to DL.

It’s only after that that I’ll really know if I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.

 

The References:

Heinrich S, Birkholz T, Ihmsen H, Irouschek A, Ackermann A, Schmidt J. Incidence and predictors of difficult laryngoscopy in 11,219 pediatric anesthesia procedures. Pediatr Anesth. 2012;22:729-36.

Riveros R, Sung W, Sessler DI, Sanchez IP,  Mendoza ML, Mascha EJ, Niezgoda J. Comparison of the Truview PCD and the GlideScope video laryngoscopes with direct laryngoscopy in pediatric patients: a randomised trial. Can J Anesth 2013;60:450-7.

Lee JH, Park YH, Byon HJ, Han WK, Kim HS, Kim CS, Kim JT. A Comparative Trial of the GlideScope Video Laryngoscope to Direct Laryngoscope in Children with Difficult Direct Laryngoscopy and an Evaluation of the Effect of Blade Size. Anesth Analg 2013;117:176-81.

Sun Y, Lu Y, Huang Y, Jiang H. Pediatric video laryngoscope versus direct laryngoscope: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Pediatr Anesth. 2014;24:1056-65.

Lingappan K, Arnold JL, Shaw TL, Fernandes CJ, Pammi M. Videolaryngoscopy versus direct laryngoscopy for tracheal intubatio in neonates (Review) Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2015. dii: 10.1002/14651858.

Over on Minh Le Cong’s site, he’s also previously shared something a little more positive on videolaryngoscopy.

The image here came from Flickr Creative Commons and is unaltered. It was posted by Alibi 0591.