Vets Now’s Emergency and Critical Care UK Congress 2024 takes place at Royal Armouries, Leeds on November 7 and 8. This is the 21st annual ECC Congress and it has up to 70 hours of CPD available from an unrivalled line-up of speakers.
Julie Burnage DCR DMU FETC is an advanced ultrasound practitioner, educator and co-director of Aspire Ultrasound Consultancy Services Ltd.
Julie spent decades working with and teaching ultrasound scanning in human medicine. Having been enticed by Aspire co-director Angie Lloyd-Jones, she has spent the past few years bringing that vast knowledge to the veterinary world. She’ll be sharing it with both vets and vet nurses in joint sessions with Angie at Congress.
Click here to find out more about Congress.
Tell us about your ultrasound journey from human to veterinary medicine.
I trained as a radiographer in the early 1980s and specialised in ultrasound in 1988. I went on to run my own company and retired after it was bought out, definitely feeling I was done with the human side of things. I had no thought of working in the veterinary industry until Angie called me up, asked if I might be interested and sent me some videos showing what kind of training was available for vets. The quality of the training videos was so variable and, in some cases, giving incorrect and/or confusing information that I thought Angie had somehow made them up! But they were genuine, and I just thought that more than anything, the vets deserved better. This would then improve the service they were able to give owners and their pets and the vets themselves would feel happier knowing they were charging a fair price for providing a good service. Having always had a passion for ultrasound and being able to share that passion through teaching, I was in!
And how did things progress?
Firstly, I had to learn how to scan cats and dogs, which took a good six months even though I had decades experience driving an ultrasound machine. Part of the problem – and it’s one that faces vets who want to improve their ultrasound skills – is that we have a never-ending supply of patients on whom to practice in human medicine, while you’ll have access to considerably fewer in the veterinary world. To get a formal, competency-based qualification in human ultrasound takes hundreds of hours and vets have the added pressure of learning to scan different species. But ultrasound is ultrasound no matter who is doing the scan and what they are scanning. That’s why it doesn’t matter that we aren’t vets or vet nurses because we aren’t teaching vets and nurses how to do their jobs; we are teaching them how to do our job to the best of their ability. If you think about it, you wouldn’t want to be taught how to do heart surgery by an orthopaedic surgeon – you would want an expert heart surgeon to teach you – it’s the same with ultrasound.
You are doing a number of sessions over two days at Congress. Can you talk us through them?
The basic principles of ultrasound are the same, whoever is doing it and whatever they are scanning. So, we’ll be doing thoracic POCUS and abdominal POCUS, and those sessions, covering the basic views we would use, are for anyone to attend. They are lectures where we’ll be demonstrating where to place the probe, as well as touching on how to drive the ultrasound machine. If you don’t know how to do that, then you are making it so much harder for yourself and you could miss or create pathology which can have serious consequences. So basically, it’s about how quickly you can make the ultrasound machine work for you and get the views you need to make an accurate diagnosis in what is obviously an urgent situation.
What about the other POCUS sessions?
Those are hands-on sessions, one for vets and one for nurses. There will be five workstations, each with an ultrasound expert and all having different tasks where you’ll practice how to manipulate the probe and optimise the image. We’ll have dogs with us – healthy I’m glad to say, so you can see what normal looks like – and also tissue-mimicking phantoms to practice on. At one station we’ll teach them how to do fine-needle guidance under ultrasound control. While nurses can’t insert the needle, they can hold the probe and guide the vets so understanding the underpinning ultrasound principles will be a massive help
Why different vet and nurse sessions?
While what we are teaching is exactly the same, we have found that both vets and nurses often feel more comfortable and at ease working with their own cohort. Each group knows the day-to-day pressures they are under and by working with others from their own profession, they can share stories and anecdotes that they can understand which makes for a great shared learning experience.
What do you hope both vets and nurses will take away from your sessions?
We want them to feel more confident in picking up the probe in an emergency situation, and that they’ll know much more about what the machines they use can do. We know that when done properly, POCUS can save lives and that ultrasound in the right hands can make a massive difference in the veterinary world. We want everyone to come away from our sessions feeling less apprehensive about blowing the cobwebs off their ultrasound machine, recognising how important it is to be taught by the right people and in the right way. The presentations and workshops we are hosting at Vets Now’s ECC Congress in Leeds will not make anyone a fully competent diagnostic imager. But whether delegates are already performing ultrasound scans or are just thinking they would like to know more, they are a great starting point on what can be a very exciting learning journey. Every day I learn something new and the day I think I know it all is the day I really will retire. Every day is a school day in ultrasound.
