Training in focused echocardiography for intensive care specialists: can delivery meet perceived need?

There is increasing recognition of the utility of focused echocardiography in critically ill patients and a need for suitable training programmes to be developed to meet the specific needs of critical care. Critical care communities across Europe have struggled to implement focused echocardiography into everyday clinical practice. We aim to determine whether a training programme could be implemented during a year of advanced intensive care training in a region where none of the critical care consultant body had accreditation in echocardiography, and to establish the perceived training requirements in critical care echocardiography in our region and to evaluate what information clinicians wished to obtain from a focused echocardiography examination.