Background: The lack of competent teaching faculty is a major limitation to the expansion of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) in the field of inpatient and outpatient medicine despite the availability of approved training programs. Programmatic research demonstrates that participants have increased knowledge, skill and confidence immediately after a course. Currently there is insufficient data on long term outcomes of faculty learners following completion of a POCUS course. We sought to evaluate the faculty graduates of our POCUS course to determine current knowledge, confidence, usage, barriers and facilitators of adoption.
Methods: Beginning in 2018, we have offered an annual POCUS course for inpatient and outpatient faculty at our institution. Topics covered included basic physics and knobology, lung, cardiac, abdomen, lower extremity vascular and basic procedures. In the longitudinal phase following the course, on-site experts support hands-on training and image review. All faculty graduates of the course were emailed a link to a 26-item knowledge test and a survey assessing confidence in image acquisition and interpretation, integration of POCUS into clinical practice, and demographic information.
Results: he email was sent to 89 faculty, with a response rate of 52% (46). Participant characteristics are shown in Table 1. The overall median knowledge test score was 73% (19/26), range 8-26. Those who reported completing an image portfolio scored a median of 92% compared to 65% for those who reported none or partial completion. Thirty-five percent reported having achieved their personal learning goals. Confidence rankings are reported in Figure 1. Clinical integration of POCUS is reported in Figure 2. Facilitators and barriers to developing proficiency in POCUS are reported in Table 2.
Conclusions: We evaluated the graduating faculty of 5 cohorts of an annual 2-day institutional POCUS course through an online knowledge test and an expansive survey of confidence, clinical integration, and facilitators and barriers to POCUS adoption. The participants represent a diversity of practice settings, teaching roles, and years of experience. Participants were most confident in acquiring and interpreting images of the lung and to use POCUS to evaluate dyspnea and ascites. Time was reported as the biggest barrier to adoption and availability of online resources and access to experts were rated as the biggest facilitators. A key finding was the image portfolio as a predictor of higher score on the knowledge test. Further review of this dataset will investigate correlations of characteristics to determine predictors of success to promote learning and guide competency assessment.
