The number of patients with symptomatic pleural disease who require diagnostic and/or
therapeutic intervention is increasing. Many of these patients will present acutely
to emergency departments or medical admissions units. As a consequence, pleural procedures
such as intercostal chest drain (ICD) insertion must be performed regularly and on
both emergent and planned bases for common conditions such as pleural effusion and
pneumothorax. Whilst some larger centres have specialist teams who provide a responsive
interventional service [
[1]
], in the majority of hospitals these pleural procedures are still performed by clinicians
of all specialties. A recent survey of European internists highlighted the frequency
with which pleural interventions are performed by this group of clinicians [
[2]
]. In the United Kingdom (UK) this need is recognised in the training curricula for
core medical trainees (CMT, “senior house officers”) and higher specialty trainees
(HST, “specialist registrars”) in internal medicine (IM).Abbreviations:
ICD (intercostal chest drain), UK (United Kingdom), CMT (core medical trainees), HST (higher specialty trainees), IM (internal medicine)Keywords
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References
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: October 27, 2015
Accepted:
October 19,
2015
Received:
October 15,
2015
Identification
Copyright
© 2015 European Federation of Internal Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
