Management of Acute Dyspnea

Target Audience: This course is designed around the normal multidisciplinary management and care of critically ill patients.  The course is intended for experienced medical teams, including residents, emergency care, internal medicine, and intensive care attending physicians and consultants, and nurses, from Emergency Rooms, Internal Medicine Departments, and Intensive Care Units. Objectives: Recognize and appropriately assess and manage patients with the clinical presentations of acute dyspnea. Evaluate the medical history and physical examination findings in these patients. Recognize the importance of the medical interview, even during an acute event. Effectively communicate with the patient and fellow team members. Improve the teamwork skills necessary for managing critically ill patients. Obtain differential diagnosis of acute dyspnea. Discuss and evaluate the outcomes of these scenarios. Apply what is learned from this course to the evaluation and treatment of future patients who present with acute dyspnea. Course Description: This intensive simulation-based course is designed to improve the management and care of patients with acute dyspnea in an in-hospital setting. This course presents five challenging scenarios in which patients with similar clinical presentations of acute dyspnea (each case of acute dyspnea has a different underlying cause) require rapid diagnosis and appropriate management to avoid disaster.  Participants must effectively communicate with the patients and each other to complete the preliminary actions, both diagnostic and interventional, necessary to establish the primary diagnosis of these diverse life-threatening situations.  The intention is to accomplish this goal via combining better-practice clinical management and improved teamwork.   The following scenarios enable participants to experience, without endangering real patients, prevalent and realistic causes of acute dyspnea encountered in Emergency Rooms, Internal Medicine Departments, and Intensive Care Units.