The heart and resuscitation

Focused echocardiography and point-of-care ultrasound are becoming core skills for doctors working in acute care and arguably a key skill set for those with an interest in resuscitation medicine. Echo is the most useful test now available to define the aetiology of shock and to guide fluid/cardiac resuscitation. This chapter aims to teach the core and intermediate skills required to perform echo as non-cardiologists. These skills do not replace the need for a cardiology opinion or a detailed assessment by a trained sonographer or cardiologist, but simply enable those caring for patients to obtain key real-time information as rapidly as possible. The chapter’s focus is not on comprehensive assessment, but on rapidly identifying the causes of shock and acute heart failure and guiding therapy. The emphasis is therefore different from that found in dedicated textbooks on echocardiography written for trainees in cardiology and is at a simpler level.