A capnography waveform chart is one of the most useful things you can keep within arm’s reach at a workstation. The number on a capnograph tells you how much carbon dioxide is present. The shape tells you why, and it
Capnography guidelines are scattered across a dozen societies, in documents written for different specialties, in different decades, in different countries. Anyone trying to answer a simple question, such as “are we required to use this?”, has to go and find
A hospital equipment list is almost always written department by department. The theatre has its list, the intensive care unit has its own, the emergency department has another. That is how budgets work, and it is a reasonable way to
An ambulance equipment list is not a smaller version of a hospital list. It is a different list, because the constraints are different. There is no wall socket, so everything runs on battery. There is vibration and acceleration, so tubes
An operation theatre equipment list looks, at first, like a procurement exercise. It is not. It is a safety system with a budget attached. Every item below exists because something can go wrong without it, and the accreditation and regulatory
The essential equipment for emergency physicians is defined by a constraint no other speciality faces quite so sharply. You often have no history, no notes, no diagnosis and no time. So the devices that matter are the ones that either
The essential equipment for intensivists is not really a shopping list. It is a set of jobs. Intensive care does two things. It supports organs that are failing, and it tells you whether that support is working. Every device in
The essential equipment for anaesthesiologists is not a long list. Strip away everything that is nice to have, and three monitors remain, because each one answers a question the other two cannot. Is the patient ventilating? Is the patient oxygenated?
Capnography myths survive because they all sound sensible. Each one is a small, plausible shortcut, and each one has led someone to act on a number they should have questioned, or to ignore one they should have acted on. Here
EtCO2 in pregnancy breaks two rules that hold almost everywhere else in medicine. The normal range shifts down, so a reading of 31 mmHg in a pregnant woman is not hypocapnia, it is her physiology working correctly. And the gap
