French Helen, Leddy Christopher, McCall Philip
West of Scotland School of Anaesthesia, NHS Education for Scotland, Glasgow, UK.
Royal Hospital for Children, Glasgow, UK.
J Intensive Care Soc. 2025 Sep 23:17511437251365176. doi: 10.1177/17511437251365176.
Point-of-care echocardiography accreditation is not mandated within the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine (FICM) training curriculum, yet it is commonly utilised to aid clinical decision making in the intensive care unit. We designed a survey to assess barriers to accreditation in point-of-care echocardiography across Scottish critical care units. The majority (70.1%) of respondents were unaccredited, with the most common barrier ( = 102) being 'lack of time with a mentor for supervised scanning'. This was amplified by the fact that only 25% of mentors received job planned time for scanning. Men were over-represented in those with accreditation, accounting for 61.4% of accredited clinicians, despite making up 51.0% of all respondents. In contrast, women represented 62.5% of unaccredited individuals who had undertaken at least one attempt at the process. We did not find a difference with other protected characteristics. This survey suggests that targeted support locally for those struggling to complete the process could address some of these concerns, and that further work needs to be taken to identify and address gender inequity in point of care echocardiography accreditation.
重症医学学院（FICM）的培训课程中并未强制要求进行床旁超声心动图认证，但它在重症监护病房中常用于辅助临床决策。我们设计了一项调查，以评估苏格兰各重症监护病房在床旁超声心动图认证方面的障碍。大多数（70.1%）受访者未获得认证，最常见的障碍（n = 102）是“缺乏与导师一起进行监督扫描的时间”。仅有25%的导师有计划用于扫描的工作时间，这一情况加剧了该问题。在获得认证的人员中男性占比过高，占获得认证临床医生的61.4%，尽管男性在所有受访者中仅占51.0%。相比之下，在至少尝试过一次该认证过程的未获认证人员中，女性占62.5%。我们未发现其他受保护特征方面存在差异。这项调查表明，针对那些难以完成认证过程的人员提供当地的针对性支持可以解决其中一些问题，并且需要进一步开展工作，以识别和解决床旁超声心动图认证中的性别不平等问题。
