The western journal of emergency medicine
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study
Performance accuracy of hand-on-needle versus hand-on-syringe technique for ultrasound-guided regional anesthesia simulation for emergency medicine residents.
Ultrasound-guided nerve blocks (UGNB) are increasingly used in emergency care. The hand-on-syringe (HS) needle technique is ideally suited to the emergency department setting because it allows a single operator to perform the block without assistance. The HS technique is assumed to provide less exact needle control than the alternative two-operator hand-on-needle (HN) technique; however this assumption has never been directly tested. The primary objective of this study was to compare accuracy of needle targeting under ultrasound guidance by emergency medicine (EM) residents using HN and HS techniques on a standardized gelatinous simulation model. ⋯ For EM residents learning UGNBs, the HN technique was not associated with superior needle control. Our results suggest that the single-operator HS technique provides equivalent needle control when compared to the two-operator HN technique.