by Dr. Michael O’Reilly
You can learn all there is to know about a drug, but if you don’t have an IV in a critical situation you may as well be a faith healer. What’s worse than that? No airway. If you don’t have an airway you don’t have anything.
Much to our surprise, the medical school curriculum does not include formal instruction in airway management or vascular access. Since the anesthesiologist is the expert at securing vascular access and a patent airway, we set up a course to teach first- and second-year medical students these vital skills. The students seem to like the idea of doing something other than class work and of sticking a needle in someone. The course is offered late in the afternoon and we provide pizza and refreshments. The students have proved facile in the rapid and complete consumption of pizza and we have not been able to offer any instruction to improve on their technique in this regard.
Truth be told, the real reason we offer the course is to provide students exposure to what anesthesiologists do, since they do not have any required exposure to anesthesia during their medical school experience. Students taking the course are strongly encouraged to visit the operating room and perfect their skills on real patients. Many students have come back repeatedly to gain experience and are now as skilled at placing the IVs and managing the airway as a novice anesthesia resident. We are hoping that exposure to anesthesiology will encourage students to do a more extensive rotation in our specialty and perhaps plant the seed of interest for a future career in anesthesiology.
Jim Smith is an example of an M1 who took the IV-Airway-Pizza course and then came to the operating room almost once a week for several months to perfect the skills developed. Smith eventually took a summer job as a half-time anesthesia technician. He spent the other half of his time working in the research laboratory of Dr. Michael O’Reilly. Actually, Smith worked long hours on his project to measure the expression of adhesion receptors on murine neutrophils following infection. Using flow cytometry and fluorescent labeling antibodies, he showed increased expression of CD11b and CD18 on neutrophils from mice with a polymicrobial intraabdominal infection. Smith made an excellent presentation to our faculty and he is submitting an abstract to be presented at the International Anesthesia Research Society meeting next spring. He was able to conduct a number of experiments and presented the data to the research conference at the end of the summer.
Since we started the program in 1995/96, 160 M1 and M2 students have taken the course, and we have received many positive comments. Department Chair Dr. Kevin Tremper personally conducts the course with the help of other faculty and residents. It’s a lot of fun to watch him perform for the students. It’s worth the price of admission, so if you are around when the course is offered, stop by, have some pizza and enjoy the show.