Therapeutic impact of basic critical care echocardiography performed by residents after limited training.

Background: The objective was to assess the agreement between therapeutic proposals derived from basic critical care echocardiography performed by novice operators in ultrasonography after a limited training (residents) and by experts considered as reference. Secondary objectives were to assess the agreement between operators' answers to simple clinical questions and the concordance between basic two-dimensional measurements.

Methods: This observational, prospective, single-center study was conducted over a 3-year period in a medical-surgical intensive care unit.