hi everyone this is Lahiru from abc's of anesthesia now i'm really excited to present
to you our very first fully online course and i'm launching today on youtube so let's get started
this course is called the medical student's guide to anesthesia and i've posted on this
platform called thinkific which is a fantastic way of just presenting this information in an easily
digestible way for all my students so the first important thing when you sign up make sure you use
this coupon code med student 70 so that makes sure that you get 70 off this medical student
this medical student course i'll make sure i'll put all the links and the coupon code in the story
notes below as well so medical student guide to anesthesia now the reason i started this course is
that i think in anesthesia a learning anesthesia as a medical student can be really challenging
you may only get even one session uh maybe if you're lucky a week two weeks and if you're really
really passionate about anesthetics you might get even four weeks on your elective placement but
generally speaking anesthesia isn't that well taught in medical school so i had a couple of
fantastic helpers icham and victor and they went through the curriculums the anesthesia curriculums
and many of the universities around australia and compiled them together so pretty much the
curriculum here is pretty much based on what you might find in any medical student curriculum in
australia so let's get to it so this is a medical student's guide to anesthesia and essentially
this whole course goes through that curriculum curriculum but what i found out was a problem with
a lot of these curriculums is that the amount of knowledge to churn through in just maybe
a session or a week of anesthesia is just simply too much so i thought what are my aims i want you
to get a really good foundation of the basics you know practical knowledge when you get into your
rotation so that's what this course is about lots of practical information but only the essentials
so we're not going to get bogged down by lots of basic pharmacology and physiology we're going to
get to the stuff that's very useful for decision making and what most anesthetists do and that way
i think you'll have a much more interesting experience because you'll be talking with
anaesthesis and and trainees who are seeing you at their level and talking about really advanced
concepts even with just a little bit of knowledge so the first step is anesthesia resources so i've
got this whole section just on the best resources now it you know it's one of those things where
it's not necessarily important that you remember everything but if you know where to search for
something that's far more usable especially if you're only going to be doing anesthesia for a
short amount of time so i've got a whole section just on where to find the best resources including
you know websites youtube podcasts and textbooks as well journals and apps i've got a whole section
of essential frameworks and anesthesia and so whether you're doing surgery anesthesia physician
training general practice piece or whatever it is you're doing if you have really solid frameworks
at the start it'll mean that the more advanced you get the more knowledge you acquire the more skills
you apply if you have a really solid framework to attach those concepts to you will do better and
so i take a lot of time in making sure that you're very solid with your frameworks you'll be able to
answer these questions with far more knowledge and just this kind of broad approach to things which
will be very impressive to your supervisors if you can get this stuff down pat so we covered that in
a bit of detail we go through a number of other things so we go through pre-operative assessment
and again this is one of those things this will be your bread and butter so when you're on your
anaesthetic rotation or any rotation you'll be seeing patients time and time again and so what we
what i wanted to give you here is some of the most practical stuff with pre-operative assessments
because you'll be in pre-admission clinic you'll be seeing patients before they go into theater
and this is the whole framework i've also provided some templates that will assist you in you know
checklisting off to make sure that you've got all your questions covered straight away and you don't
miss anything that way you can present something back to your consultant with a lot of knowledge
and a lot of authority even at a junior level so we go through all of that possibilities
history past medical history medications allergies fasting examination findings
airway exam all those basics that you'd be expected to know on day one we cover that
now this is next topic is quite broad i've been limited here because we'll cover this in far more
detail in future courses and you can also look at this in the abcs of anesthesia boot camp playlist
but we go through what is general anesthesia and what's the you know what's the vibe of anesthesia
so i want you to be able to get anesthesia as early as possible so we go through essentially
the purpose of anesthesia and how to approach it from a practical point of view we also go
through monitoring and he can be helpful there and clinical handover again these are some of those
really high yield topics that will make you useful even as a medical student now one of the things
that will be really really vital to you in your rotation is anesthesia pharmacology now a lot of
what we do is based on the drugs that we are able to give to achieve certain endpoints and so again
a lot of these drugs you will have never heard of except in your anesthesia rotation and that's why
we need to go through in a bit of detail so again i'm not going to teach you all the you know really
really esoteric numbers the pk protein binding the numbers that you're not going to remember
i'm going to teach you the principles and the points of difference of each agent and why they're
special and what are the harmful side effects so if you can get those things the main action
harmful side effects and special features you'll be able to make decisions even at an early stage
on choosing one anesthetic agent over another so i want to give you that you know coverage broadly
but also with some advanced you know also with some advanced facts and frameworks just from the
start a big part of your anesthesia rotation is likely to be your pain rounds and pain management
whether it's ordering multimodal analgesia intraoperatively and post-operatively or doing
pain rounds and making sure that your patients are well after the operation you'll be really able to
impress your supervisors by being able to take a good history and clark patients knowing about pain
knowing the definitions and doing basic things like an assessment of pain in a very structured
way as well as managing pain with multi-metal analgesia so again at the end of this session
these lectures you should be able to assess pain and be very useful on your pain around
by documenting the historical findings as well as being able to make sure your patients
on multi-metal analgesia and make a referral if necessary all of that stuff we're going to cover
next session is some fluid therapy and again this is so high yield whether you're anesthetics
or ed or just a junior doctor on the ward covering making sure patients are inadequately resuscitated
having their daily fluid intake this lecture is really important we go through how fluid
distributes in the body again how anesthetist thinks about fluids and how fluid distributes is
really important so you get kind of a linger that we talk the way we talk about fluids and it's also
how do you assess and how do you treat this i want to go through all the basics but there's actually
not too much there that you need to know if you have this framework you know how it distributes
you know how to assess it and you know how to treat it in a very structured way you'll be able
to again just hang on extra knowledge as you learn it as you can tell most of anesthesia is really
clinical anesthesia pharmacology basic physiology and then procedural skills now a lot of the
procedural skills you will learn on the job it's very difficult to teach through a video how to bag
mask someone once you get your hands on a patient supervising up you know ventilating them using an
lma using back mask ventilation intubating you will learn a lot of these things really
quickly so what i want to do here is go through iv cannulation now every cannulation is considered
a really basic task but i think it's one of the most important tasks you ever will have to do and
can be one of the most challenging now there are a number of times when you will see even experienced
this taking an hour or so to put a drip in because iv cannulation can be really really difficult in
this lecture i go through so many different skills and techniques but i think it's it's really that
important i go through almost everything that i know about iv cannulation in this section
with a combination of videos and resources so i'm hoping that they'll be really useful to you
whether you're going to be in your anaesthetic rotation or as an intern and junior doctor
i mean i think one of the most important things as an intern or junior doctor is that you're going to
be time poor there's going to be so many things asked of you and one of those things is going to
be cannulation after cannulation if you can cut your cannulation time down really short make sure
you don't fail too many times and you're really efficient and spot on with your technique you
will save time that will be better spent learning and managing your other sick patients so that's
the medical student's guide to anesthesia i'm really excited about this course it's the first
fully online course i've ever created uh i'll put the link down below so please sign up if you have
any feedback if you have any questions um or anything at all please put in the comments i
really want to make sure that this is a really valuable resource and if you have any feedback
for me about the course feel free to contact me at abc's of anesthesia at gml.com so thanks very
much for watching please share with anyone who might be interested and i'll see you next time
you