[Practice Guidelines for Central Venous Access 2020 - Time for German Guidelines]. / Amerikanische Praxis-Leitlinie für den zentralen Venenzugang aus dem Jahr 2020.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists released practice guidelines for central venous access in 2020, and the entire world literature was examined for evidence on how to perform the entire process with best practice and minimal risk and harm to the patient. These guidelines may serve as a gold standard for individual procedural steps, allowing practitioners and hospital departments to critically question the own standard and improve upon them.We interpreted the guidelines for individual procedural steps on how to improve success of catheterization, minimize risks or adverse effects, enhance the management of accidental arterial punctures, adhere to evidence-based practices, and generally reduce the trauma of puncturing. In our opinion, the most needed recommendation for central venous access is to utilize ultrasound guidance, a practice that many international societies have already incorporated into their published national guidelines.In our view, it is time to implement a national guideline for central venous access using ultrasound in Germany. Doing so may improve success rates in the first attempt, reduce procedural time, decrease the number of needle insertions per patient, and lower the rate of arterial punctures. This approach represents best practice from ethical, insurance, civil rights, and patient security perspectives, and is supported by relevant societies.

Erector spinae plane block for affective and safe analgesia in a patient with severe penetrating chest trauma caused by an explosion in the battlefield.

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine continues to generate many complex traumatic injuries and provides unique challenges to anaesthesiologists who provide medical care at various levels of medical evacuation. We report the successful use of an ultrasound-guided continuous erector spinae plane (ESP) block in a patient with severe posterolateral chest trauma. The acute perioperative outcome of the patient was improved with the ESP block, the main benefits being excellent analgesia and minimal postoperative morphine requirements without influencing the risk of bleeding and coagulopathy. We conclude that continuous ESP block can be utilized to provide excellent analgesia following massive thoracic trauma. It's ease of placement under ultrasound guidance and low risk of complications makes this technique particularly useful in war medicine.

[Lung Ultrasound for Anesthesia, Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine]. / Lungensonografie für Anästhesie, Intensiv- und Notfallmedizin.

Lung ultrasound is an underrated tool in preclinical emergency situations, intensive care units, ORs and emergency rooms. For certain clinical questions, there is a drastically higher sensitivity in comparison to chest X-ray examinations (sensitivity in pneumothorax diagnostics 86 vs. 28%, specificity 97 vs. 100%. A standardized examination improves the quality of the ultrasound examination and thus the diagnostic value. The article provides basic information on pulmonary ultrasound and aims to highlight the superiority of ultrasound over x-ray procedures for anesthesia, intensive care and emergency medicine in accordance to the international evidence-based recommendations for point of care ultrasound. Finally, we added a checklist for the "post-interventional exclusion of pneumothorax" and a checklist for the "diagnosis of dyspnea by sonography".