Sedation at the Front Door

A bespoke blended-learning course for doctors, nurses, advanced clinical practitioners and other registered healthcare professionals involved in the assessment, delivery, monitoring or recovery of patients undergoing procedural sedation.

12 CPD points (issued by the School of Medicine, Cardiff University)

This course has been developed to address the teaching and training need in sedation and takes advantage of:

• High-fidelity simulation facilities at Cardiff University’s Emergency Medicine Academic Centre (EMAC)
• Small group teaching
• Highly skilled and experienced faculty (with years of experience working in Emergency Departments)

Who it’s for

This course is designed for doctors, nurses, advanced clinical practitioners and other registered healthcare professionals involved in procedural sedation.

It will be particularly relevant to clinicians working at the hospital front door, including emergency departments, urgent treatment centres, acute assessment units and other areas in which urgent or unscheduled procedural sedation may be required.

Delegates should already have a clinical role in assessing, preparing, monitoring or caring for patients undergoing sedation. The course covers both adult and paediatric practice, although delegates must continue to work within their own professional scope of practice and local governance arrangements.

What you’ll learn

By the end of the course, delegates should be able to:

• Define procedural sedation and distinguish between minimal, moderate, deep and dissociative sedation.
• Identify appropriate indications for procedural sedation and consider suitable alternatives.
• Recognise patients, procedures and clinical environments in which sedation may be inappropriate or require senior escalation.
• Undertake and document a structured pre-sedation assessment, including ASA classification, airway assessment, comorbidities, medication, fasting and aspiration risk.
• Prepare the patient, family, team, environment and equipment for procedural sedation.
• Allocate clear multidisciplinary roles and conduct an effective pre-procedure safety brief.
• Select an appropriate sedation strategy based on the patient, procedure, intended depth of sedation and clinical environment.
• Describe the safe use of commonly employed agents, including ketamine, propofol, opioids and benzodiazepines.
• Recognise important drug interactions, particularly the potentiating effects of opioids and benzodiazepines.
• Apply appropriate monitoring standards, including continuous capnography, pulse oximetry, ECG and non-invasive blood-pressure monitoring.
• Recognise and manage common sedation-related complications, including airway obstruction, hypoventilation, apnoea, hypoxia, hypotension, laryngospasm and emergence reactions.
• Use naloxone and flumazenil appropriately and understand the implications for subsequent monitoring.
• Apply safe recovery, observation, discharge and post-sedation care standards.
• Document sedation effectively and respond appropriately to adverse events, including incident reporting and duty of candour.
• Recognise when a procedure should be stopped, abandoned or escalated to anaesthesia, critical care or theatre.

Understand how human factors, including crowding, noise, time pressure, cognitive load and team communication, affect sedation safety.

Topics covered

Pre-course learning (4 hours)

The eLearning consists of 4 modules (Principles & Governance; Assessment & Preparation; Drugs, Depth & Decision-Making; Complications and Recovery), with multiple sub-modules in each unit.

There are optional formative questions to test knowledge also. All course material will be provided for 6 weeks before and 6 weeks after the face-to-face course.

Face-to-face course (6 hours)

The face-to-face component is where delegates will be working in small groups to develop their skills with guidance from high performing emergency physicians through simulation and extensive debrief and discussion. The following is the timetable for the day:

Post-course 'open book' eAssessment (1 hour)

The post-course eAssessment will open following the face-to-face component. It can be sat in an open-book asynchronous fashion within 6 weeks of the end of the face-to-face course.

Benefits

This course has been issued with 11 CPD points. Other benefits include:

• Blended delivery approach: eLearning component allows you to learn flexibly, in your own time, while the face-to-face session offers practical multidisciplinary peer learning
• Teaching that is aligned with contemporary UK clinical practice
• Faculty: clinical experts in sedation
• Competitive fees compared to alternative sedation courses
• Once you have completed the course, you become ‘Sedation at the Front Door’ course alumni and we will send you a tri-annual update with key alterations to guidelines or policies
• Alumni have the opportunity to apply for faculty positions following successful completion
• Alumni are invited to reattend every 4 years to maintain contemporary sedation practice

For emergency medicine doctors and allied health professionals, this course meets national curricular requirements for annual appraisal