Residents participate in our annual Basic Skills Boot Camp

Twenty-two residents beginning their second year of anesthesiology residency participated in a week of workshops and lectures to prepare them for their first clinical anesthesiology year (the CA-1 year).

The 2024 Basic Skills Boot Camp was held the first week of June and included training in a variety of skills needed in a clinical setting including airway management and anesthesia maintenance, donning and doffing of personal protective equipment, perioperative medicine, and spinal anesthesia.

The spinal anesthesia ultrasound workshop was a new edition to the boot camp this year. Led by physicians from our Acute Pain Medicine Division, Barys Ihnatsenka, M.D., associate professor of anesthesiology, and Soleil Schutte, M.D., assistant professor of anesthesiology, this workshop aimed to prepare our upcoming CA-1 residents to perform spinal anesthesia in the OR. The workshop started with a lecture and demonstration followed by a practice session and hands-on and written tests.

During the two-hour practice session, residents rotated through stations where they practiced ultrasound scanning and landmark-based and ultrasound (US)-assisted spinal procedures on simulators. They also learned the non-technical aspects of spinal procedures. Schutte emphasized that most residents felt more confident in doing spinal anesthesia procedures after the workshop.

“The simulators used for testing were more challenging than the ones used for practice, nevertheless, almost all residents did a landmark-based spinal successfully and some of them also succeeded in doing US-assisted spinals when palpation landmarks became impossible,” Schutte said.

In addition to Schutte and Ihnatsenka, a number of faculty, residents, and staff worked hard to make this year’s boot camp a success. Many thanks to the Anesthesiology Education Office staff, the team at the Center for Simulation, Safety & Advanced Learning Technologies (CSSALT), and the faculty and residents below who instructed. 

Special thanks to those outside the department who also came to teach our residents in their areas of expertise:

Learn more about our residency program.