hi everyone there's abc's of anesthesia and
on this video i'm going to go through one of the questions i get asked most commonly which is
what are the best apps for learning anesthesia so let's get started
i had the usual disclaimer i had no sponsorships or incentives these are
really my personal opinion but what i think are the best apps that are going to help your learning
so let's get to it now there's actually five apps that i find really really useful
and these apps are medscape drug doses medcalc pdstat and anso now aside from those there are
a couple of apps that i haven't used personally for clinical anesthesia i used to use the old
oxford handbook anesthesia app which is no longer available but there's two apps that are
quite sim that they look quite similar and that includes the handbook of clinical anesthesia and
five-minute anesthesia consult so i think these are reasonably expensive apps they're probably
about the price of a textbook but overall you know you can probably get the same information
by you know those bja ed.org articles from the british general anesthesia and from the
textbooks i've put up on my last podcast that you can probably get from that link up there
let's go through these apps so the first one is medscape so medscape is a fantastic app for
general medicine first of all it's free and you can look up any medical conditioning and
it's kind of like having the oxford handbook of medicine in your palm so you can really look up
any condition and get a bit of information as uh you know for anesthesia not only are we in
any this but we're also physicians and we really need to know about these other medical conditions
and get an idea of you know what their problems and what their pathologies are going to be like
and how they might affect anesthesia so often i will have medscape as a very useful reference
tool and if i've got a patient with an interesting condition that i haven't
read about recently or maybe i haven't even heard of it medscape has a lot of that up-to-date detail
and again it's a free app so absolutely fantastic what's also really interesting it's got an inbuilt
interaction checkers so if you had a patient who was on a really random array of medications and
you weren't really sure of the interactions you could probably put those into the interaction
checker to get some really good information about that so that is medscape fantastic app
the website's fantastic i just can't highly recommend it enough so that's the messcape app
it's got a great app it's a great website as well and i remember using this
continuously through my medical training and through my anaesthetic training and even now
now the next step is drug doses now this is a fantastic app that was originally for
pediatric medications but the thing is that it also has all the adult dosing so it's kind of
like the australian standard most people would go to this application
uh when they want to you know know exactly what the right dose is for antibiotics or
antimedics or whatever else it has pretty much everything it used to be this really
tiny pamphlet and you just keep that in your pocket and look at you know look at all the
numbers when you weren't sure about pediatric dosing but now it's available as an app it's
regularly updated and it's a very reasonable cost as well so a fantastic app and that's drug doses
now medcalc is another fantastic resource again it's available on the website as well but having
it as this free app in your in your palm is just incredibly useful so this app really allows you to
search for any formulas whereas the aphil score for post-operative nausea vomiting or maybe the
cardiac anesthesia risk or creatinine clearance by the cockroach equation maybe it's chad vasquez
atrial fibrillation and thromboembolic risk or has bled for the bleeding risk for these af patients
so either way um it's a fantastic app you can type in whatever score or formula that you need and you
can and it pretty much goes through that and the best thing is when you enter your specialty it
has some really good quick notes for you know which specialty you might be interested so
anesthesiology it's got the anesthesia anesthesia related formulas um and again the duke xtv status
index or the dasi index this is so useful and it's an app that i'd use constantly as well
now one of the other apps we'll go through is the pdstat app it's a pd step so occasionally
you'll get a pediatric patient especially in a children's hospital and obviously so many
things are different whether it's their vital signs the airway equipment you use
the dosing for medications everything is different for children often based on weight and age
and having a really easy resource where you can just type in the weight or the length of the
patient or maybe even get the age and the expected weight and just look at all those numbers directly
means that you have far less cognitive loads so imagine you know the thing with anesthesia
is everything happens really quickly uh and you don't always have as much time to think and back
in the old days and even now i write out various formulas for things to make sure that i've got
everything that i need at my fingertips i've got the dose for propofol sucks methodia
atrophy adrenaline fluid as well as ett size and depth lma size and fluid bowls so i've already
written all that stuff down but this app allows you to type in the weight and get all of the
information readily available to you so again it's a fantastic app and really really useful
and so the pd setup that's kind of what it looks like there and you can see that you can type in
the age weight or length so let's say we put the weight as six kilograms and then it just goes
through a whole bunch of really good stuff there and so this will then go through whatever you
might need so whether it's airway intervention it'll go through all the different airway
intervention equipment the tube sizes uncuffed or cuffed blade size tube depth lma etc as well
as induction medications paralytic medications all the other medications that are that are related as
well as antibiotics and anti-medics and anything you might need for cardiac resuscitation so again
a fantastic free app and i know there's a few other apps on the market that are you
know that actually cost a subscription but this is free and absolutely amazing
now the next app is called anso or anesthesia sono anatomy and so that's what that looks like
and so first of all i just click start and the best thing about this is that it just shows you
all the different you know blocks and a lot of really useful information about all these for
example if i go to upper limb blocks i can look at a brachial plexus interscalene block and there
we have it you've got the sono anatomy and i can even type in a few uh i can even identify
the different nerve roots carotid artery and um also the vein as well as it comes up and i can
outline the needle path as well and it has just so much really really useful information there
so it's absolutely fantastic for that if you're not really sure of what the anatomy looks like
on the sun anatomy view you can also look at a more schematic diagram of it
and there's also pictures that show you the ergonomics as well so again an absolutely
fantastic app for learning this so those are the really useful apps either they're free or
they have a very small cost again really useful to have all the resources on your on your palm
ready to go when you're starting out learning anastasia but also when you get more experience
as i mentioned before if you want clinical anesthesia apps the
things available are the handbook of clinical anesthesia and the five-minute anesthesia consult
but like i said you can probably get a lot of that information and not need to spend a lot of money
if you can buy a textbook on sale or a second-hand textbook like clinical anesthesiology as well as
going to the bja ed.org site so that's a british old anesthesia review article site um and pretty
much i think i i reckon most of the information you need will be really really good from that
resource so i hope that was useful those are the apps that i found really useful for for learning
anesthesia and even onwards as i've become a specialist i still use these apps because you know
having information at the point of care is just so incredibly useful if you enjoyed this video please
share with anyone who might be interested and thanks very much for watching see you next time
you