A host of medical professionals met in Queenstown for the annual Ecmo Symposium, focused on improving the skills of New Zealand medical professionals, with help from a global team, in using the artificial heart-lung machine.
Ecmo, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, is used to treat severely unwell patients who cannot be supported with conventional ICU treatments, such as those who have suffered a heart attack, are hypothermic, or have severe asthma.
Dunedin Hospital intensive care specialist Dr Stefan Wiebe, the Ecmo lead and symposium organiser, said Ecmo was similar to technology used in cardiac theatres when a heart operation was occurring, but a "more sustainable form that you can do for a couple of days, or in an intensive-care format ... to allow organs to recover".
For a patient who had suffered hypothermic cardiac arrest, for example, ideally, treatment should be initiated within 60 minutes.
Over the past couple of years there had been a concerted effort to establish a regional network throughout New Zealand to increase accessibility to the service.
"Dunedin started that about two and a-half years ago ... and we have people from all other cardiac centres [at the symposium], from Waikato, Wellington and Christchurch, with their Ecmo teams, to start learning this and implementing it," Dr Wiebe said.
In Dunedin, medical staff worked closely with HeliOtago and the Helicopter Emergency Service (Hems) to have the technology set up to be mobile so they could take everything they needed "within minutes" and fly anywhere in the Southern region to provide the treatment.
The simulation at Tarras on Wednesday night involved the rescue of a hypothermic patient drowning in a pond.
Mediquip’s Bronwyn O’Hara, of Brisbane, said "Bob", an ultrasound simulator made by CAE Healthcare, taught transthoracic, transoesophageal, abdominal and lung ultrasound, using a "very clever" tracking system.
"There’s no anatomy, nothing inside the body, just very clever software that tracks where you are, so you can teach learners how to interpret an ultrasound image on a 2D screen."
Dr Wiebe said because Ecmo was only being used about 50 times a year across New Zealand at present it was important staff continued training to maintain their skills, which was why the symposium — provided "basically for free" thanks to sponsorship — was so important.
