Equip your nurses to use advancing ultrasound technology with SonoSim, proven to help learners acquire & interpret ultrasound imagery efficiently with our self-paced platform.
Workplace evolution has led to traditional tasks and roles formerly reserved for physicians being transitioned to advanced practice providers, such as physician assistants, nurse practitioners, certified nurse midwives, clinical nurse specialists, and certified registered nurse anesthetists. Healthcare providers who perform a physical examination coupled with point-of-care ultrasound are uniquely empowered to better understand patient anatomy and detect pathologic conditions.
As frontline care providers, nurses are always under pressure to provide more efficient and cost-effective healthcare. Technological advances have led to rapid growth in point-of-care ultrasonography. Appropriate use of this technology coupled with robust training solutions will empower nurses and extend the scope of practice of advanced-practice nurses. This broader responsibility and added skill set will radically improve frontline healthcare delivery and efficiency. The list of topics relevant to nurse training is long and will continue to evolve and expand.
Most medical schools are integrating point-of-care ultrasound into their curricula in various ways. Focused ultrasound instruction is used in teaching human anatomy, performing a physical examination, and executing needle-based procedures.
Similarly, nurse training programs will need to prepare their RN and ARNP program graduates to use bedside ultrasound for the benefit of patient care.
While bladder sonography and ultrasound-guided peripheral IV catheter placement are basic skills each RN should possess, APPs will have more highly refined ultrasound requirements based on practice specialty. Lack of access to ultrasound machines and trained instructors are some of the biggest challenges to integrating ultrasound into nursing programs. Nursing programs also face the challenge of providing each nursing student standardized access to pathologic cases to scan. This is where SonoSim can help.
SonoSim assists nurses with ultrasound education to perform bladder ultrasound, ultrasound-guided peripheral IV catheter placement, and other APP-specific ultrasound proficiency requirements. Ensure your nurses meet and exceed quality care indicators by performing bladder ultrasound to prevent nosocomial infections and improve patient care and satisfaction by performing ultrasound-guided peripheral IV catheter insertion in "difficult-stick" patients. Novice to advanced learners can learn ultrasound online with the most comprehensive and proven approach available and with 80+ medical topics available to choose from. SonoSim is uniquely poised to support nursing programs with the ability to uniformly train and assess any number of learners.
Nurse POCUS Literature
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Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Making health care safer: a critical analysis of patient safety practices. Evidence report/technology assessment, no. 43, 2001.
Angtuaco TL, Hopkins RH, DuBose TJ, et al. Sonographic Physical Diagnosis 101: teaching senior medical students basic ultrasound scanning skills using a compact ultrasound system. Ultrasound Q. 2007;23:157-160.
Bahl A, Pandurangadu AV, Tucker J, Bagan M. (2016). A randomized controlled trial assessing the use of ultrasound for nurse-performed IV placement in difficult access ED patients. Am J Emerg Med. 2016;34(10):1950-1954.
Brackney A, Jung D, Afonso N, et al. The utility of cardiac ultrasound in preclinical medical school curriculum. Med Sci Educ 2016; 26:597–601.
Cooper RA, Henderson T, Dietrich CL. Roles of nonphysician clinicians as autonomous providers of patient care. JAMA. 1998;280(9):795-802. doi:10.1001/jama.280.9.795.
Dreher SM, DePhilip R, Bahner D. Ultrasound exposure during gross anatomy. J Emerg Med 2014; 46:231–240.
Giles M, Watts W, O’Brien A, et al. Does our bundle stack up! Innovative nurse-led changes for preventing catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI). Healthc Infect. 2015;20(2):62-71.
Griksaitis MJ, Sawdon MA, Finn GM. Ultrasound and cadaveric prosections as methods for teaching cardiac anatomy: a comparative study. Anat Sci Educ 2012; 5:20–26.
Hoyer R, Means R, Robertson J, et al. Ultrasound-guided procedures in medical education: a fresh look at cadavers. Intern Emerg Med 2016; 11:431–436.
Ivanusic J, Cowie B, Barrington M. Undergraduate student perceptions of the use of ultrasonography in the study of “living anatomy.” Anat Sci Educ 2010; 3:318–322.
Mouratev G, Howe D, Hoppmann R, et al. Teaching medical students ultrasound to measure liver size: comparison with experienced clinicians using physical examination alone. Teach Learn Med. 2013;25: 84-88.
Nelson BP, Hojsak J, Dei Rossi E, et al. Seeing is believing: Evaluating a point-of-care ultrasound curriculum for first-year medical students. Teach Learn Med 2017; 29:85–92.
Palese A, Buchini S, Deroma L, et al. The effectiveness of the ultrasound bladder scanner in reducing urinary tract infections. a meta-analysis. J Clin Nurs 2010 Nov;19(21-22):2970- 2979.
Sampathkumar P, Barth JW, Johnson M, et al. Mayo Clinic reduces catheter-associated urinary tract infections through a bundled 6-C approach. Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf. 2016;42(6):254-261.
Shapiro RS, Ko PP, Jacobson S. A pilot project to study the use of ultrasonography for teaching physical examination to medical students. Comput Biol Med 2002; 32:403–409.
Teichgräber U, Meyer J, Nautrup CP, et al. Ultrasound anatomy: a practical teaching system in human gross anatomy. Med Educ 1996; 30:296–298.
Tshibwabwa ET, Groves HM, Levine MA. Teaching musculoskeletal ultrasound in the undergraduate medical curriculum. Med Educ. 2007;5(5):517–518.
Umscheid C, Mitchell M, Agarwal R, Williams K, Brennan P. Mortality from reasonably- preventable hospital-acquired infections. included in written testimony by the Society of Healthcare Epidemiology of America for the committee on oversight and government reform hearing on healthcare-associated infections: A preventable epidemic, chaired by Henry A. Waxman, April 16, 2008, Washington, DC. [congressional testimony].
Wittich CM, Montgomery SC, Neben MA, et al. Teaching cardiovascular anatomy to medical students by using a handheld ultrasound device. JAMA. 2002;5(9):1062–1063.
Yatim J, Wong, KS, Ling ML, Tan SB, Tan KY, Hockenberry M. A nurse‐driven process for timely removal of urinary catheters. Int J Urol Nurs. 2016;10(3):167-172.
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