VTE Dublin 2017, and its Ultrasound Workshop. 19th of September, 2017 POST·MERIDIEM 11:01

I want to make a shout-out Cian McDermott, Andy Neill and everyone else involved in organising and running the Ultrasound Workshop at the VTE Dublin conference. Excellent sessions, great instructors, wonderful to have formal instruction on ultrasound for DVT, PE, and an introduction to echocardiogram.

I’m a GP trainee in Donegal who does Emergency Medicine as a side specialty, taking the exams and working lots of shifts in Northern Ireland. There’s a lot of cross-over between the two sets of generalists, and if anything, there’s even more reason for GPs to be putting ultrasound probes to people than ED doctors; ‘I haven’t felt my [unborn] baby move in just over a day’ should never go to the Emergency Department, absent bleeding or pain; poor local access to echo means I have a patient currently who probably has a new right-to-left ventricular shunt across a VSD, but her best chance of having that confirmed in the next 18 months is my buying something like a Philips S4-1 and putting it to her chest.

Thankfully, my first ED shift after the workshop wasn’t as eventful as that of Dan Horner. I only had a thirty-something man with back pain and light-headedness, who happily had a normal abdominal aortic diameter, and a non-EU expectant mother with a headache, at 18 weeks gestation, who couldn’t access the usual antenatal care because the Home Office was siting on her documentation. She was very glad to see her singleton intrauterine pregnancy with good fetal movement, good heartbeat and an abdominal circumference appropriate for dates.

So, in sum; ultrasound, great, VTE Dublin ultrasound workshop, fantastic!