Cricothyroidotomy competence and injuries using nonmedical equipment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: International guidelines recommend cricothyroidotomy as a life-saving procedure for 'cannot intubate, cannot ventilate' situations. Although commercially available sets facilitate surgical cricothyroidotomy, regular training seems to be the key to success. OBJECTIVES: The goal was to investigate if trained anaesthetists are able to transfer their skill in one surgical cricothyroidotomy technique to another. The primary hypothesis postulated that trained anaesthetists could perform an emergency cricothyroidotomy equally fast and successfully with a pocketknife compared with a surgical cricothyroidotomy set. DESIGN: Crossover noninferiority randomised controlled trial. SETTING: After written informed consent and ethics committee approval, this single-centre study was performed at the University Hospital of Bern, Bern, Switzerland. PARTICIPANTS: Altogether, 61 study participants already familiar with surgical cricothyroidotomy were included. INTERVENTION: The use of a commercially available cricothyroidotomy set was compared with a short-bladed pocketknife and ballpoint pen barrel. A pig-larynx cadaver model including trachea, with pig skin overlaid, was used. Participants underwent additional training sessions in both procedures. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary outcome was the time necessary to position the tracheal tube or pen barrel in the trachea. Other outcome parameters were success rate, tracheal and laryngeal injuries and preferred device. RESULTS: Cricothyroidotomy with the pocketknife was performed significantly faster and equally successfully as compared with the cricothyroidotomy sets. Tracheal and laryngeal injuries were similar in both groups. Paratracheal or submucosal placement of the pen barrel occurred in 32%, compared with 29% for the tracheal tube. Sixty-six per cent of participants preferred the cricothyroidotomy set. CONCLUSION: Regularly trained anaesthetists are able to accomplish cricothyroidotomy irrespective of the equipment used. A pocketknife with a ballpoint pen barrel was just as effective as a commercially available surgical set.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".