Echocardiography Time Audit study

Critical care echocardiography (CCE) is associated with difficult image acquisition, and requires good understanding of intensive care medicine and thorough knowledge of the very complex physiology of the individual patient. Practice of CCE demands significant commitment of time, the extent of which is unknown. Human resource planning is not possible without knowledge of these demands. We conducted an investigation of time requirements associated with performance of in-house comprehensive echocardiography in an intensive care setting. Echocardiography Time Audit is a prospective single-centre audit conducted in a 34-bed tertiary university intensive care unit (ICU) with 3,400 annual admissions, over a period of 12 months (from August 2013 to July 2014). Predefined components of comprehensive echocardiographic examinations were timed when performed by ICU physicians with dual formal qualifications in intensive care and echocardiography, or by critical care echocardiography Fellows.