We recommend a five day session as your initial course as the first day your head is spinning so much from all of the information coming at you, the new environment, etc. that you really don’t retain a lot. The second day you start to get the hang of things and about half way though that day is when you’ll actually start to learn things. By the third day things are starting to make sense. The fourth day is when you start to flourish and gain a lot of confidence. The fifth day really cements it all together for you.
We normally schedule Monday through Friday and we finish a bit early on Fridays so most people can still catch a flight home later Friday afternoon. Ideally you would arrive sometime on Sunday and leave late afternoon on a Friday.
Most of the time, there is just one CE doctor in the operating rooms, occasionally two. I don’t recall us ever having three CE doctors there at once; we like to keep things small and give you great one to one attention. There will be two dentist anesthesiologists present the whole time, Ken Lee and me. Additionally, we’ll have one or two dental anesthesia residents. We will run at least two operating rooms and sometimes a third. You’ll get experience working with all of us.
We like to schedule this primarily as an emergency airway management course; nothing taught during the course with respect to airway management is meant to be routinely used in moderate sedation. You’ll have confidence that you can manage the airways of the patients you sedate and if it becomes an airway emergency, you won’t panic, you’ve done this before and you’ll simply manage it as any other complication in your dental practice. It is about peace of mind, confidence and being trained well beyond anything you should have to do clinically.
We’ll discuss in some depth emergency drugs and techniques too and there’s an excellent chance that you’ll get to be involved in the management of a number of “medical emergencies”. I put that in quotes as what would be a medical emergency for a moderate sedation provider is generally no more than a nuisance for us. You’ll probably get to see and manage hypotension, maybe bradycardia.
You will absolutely, manage the airways of live patients that are unconscious and have stopped breathing.
We do this intentionally on most of our patients as a normal, routine part of general anesthesia. You’ll do this a dozen, maybe two dozen or more times throughout the week. You will probably see a laryngospasm or two and manage them as well.
I don’t know of anywhere else in the world that you can get this type of hands-on airway management on live patients. But like all medical emergencies types of courses I teach, I want you to learn a great deal, have the confidence to implement what you’ve learned should the need arise, but really, I don’t want you to ever have to use these skills in real life !
As part of your week we’ll discuss and administer various opioids. You’ll get to see the good and the bad of each of them and by the end of the week will be able to make sense deciding when you should use one or the other and what cases really benefit from opioids and which cases they won’t be of benefit.
We’re always evaluating different drugs and techniques and researching how they may, or may not, be used in moderate sedation so by the time you come out we may have other things to recommend for you. As an example, just yesterday I finished gathering data for an article that I’ll write up and publish on the respiratory depressant effects of various opioids. This is stuff never described before in the literature – exciting !
We haven’t created a 2016 course schedule yet so let us know when you would like to come out and we’ll see if we can make that time work.