Effectiveness of a simulation-based mastery learning to train clinicians on a novel cricothyrotomy procedure at an academic medical centre during a pandemic: a quasi-experimental cohort study.

Objectives: To develop and evaluate a simulation-based mastery learning (SBML) curriculum for cricothyrotomy using wet towels to suppress aerosolisation during a pandemic.

Design: Quasi-experimental, pre-post study.

Setting: Tertiary care, academic medical centre in Chicago.

Emergency cricothyrotomy during the COVID-19 pandemic: how to suppress aerosolization.

Background: Cricothyrotomy is associated with significant aerosolization that increases the potential risk of infection among healthcare providers. It is important to identify simple yet effective methods to suppress aerosolization and improve the safety of healthcare providers.

Methods: 5 ear, nose and throat and general surgeons used a locally developed hybrid cricothyrotomy simulator with a porcine trachea to test three draping methods to suppress aerosolization during the procedure: an X-ray cassette drape, dry operating room (OR) towels and wet OR towels.

Surgical management of the recurrent laryngeal nerve in thyroidectomy: American Head and Neck Society Consensus Statement.

"I have noticed in operations of this kind, which I have seen performed by others upon the living, and in a number of excisions, which I have myself performed on the dead body, that most of the difficulty in the separation of the tumor has occurred in the region of these ligaments…. This difficulty, I believe, to be a very frequent source of that accident, which so commonly occurs in removal of goiter, I mean division of the recurrent laryngeal nerve." Sir James Berry (1887).