You're asked to review a patient with dyspnoea and a wheeze.

Does he have pulmonary odema or an exacerbation of COPD? Is there a pneumonia? Could he have a pneumothroax?

Right, lets get an ECG and a CXR, some troponins and, for completeness (Oh how I dislike that as a reason), throw in a BNP for what it's worth. Now while we're waiting for all that to happen, we'll start him on some salbutamol nebs, give him a bolus of frusemide and get some antibiotics into him to cover for community acquired pneumonia. Is the CXR guy on his way yet? Damn, what if he has a PE? Better get a CTPA too.

Or, we could do a bedside lung ultrasound, decide what the patient actually has in the next 2 or 3 minutes and tailor the therapy to the problem.

If you're from the UK, you will be familiar with the ICS already, but if not...

The Intensive Care Society is the representative body in the UK for intensive care professionals and patients and is dedicated to the delivery of the highest quality of critical care to patients. 

They perform many functions for the intensive care community, such as the production of guidelines and standards, organising national meetings, training courses and focus groups.

They represent Intensive Care in wide ranging organisations from the Royal Colleges to the Department of Health and other organisations and societies with an associated stake or interest. They are also represented on the Intercollegiate Board for Training in Intensive Care Medicine.

Check out their website, where they have lots of useful and interesting resources. It's always interesting to see guidelines that others have spent many hours making, such as these ones on an approach to Adult Organ and Tissue Donation in the UK.

Last year we were a "Hard Six", this year we are a "Natural Seven" (hmmm, you could read something into that but it's probably best not to follow that particular line of thought). For the second year in a row, the Intensive Care Network has made ED/ICU online educator guru, Sott Weingart's list of top picks for the year.

Scott runs the EM Crit website, which is a gold mine of information on acute care concepts and interventions. He has also helped many of the online medical community set up their own blogs and podcasts ... kind of a Yankee Mike Cadogan. At the end of every year for the past 3 years he has picked out the sites and podcasts that he feels he's learned something from on a regular basis and reckons that others should be aware of them too.

The other six that Scott picked out are hard to argue with, though Mojo RN is a new one for me and I'll be checking it out after posting this.

Check out Scott's picks for 2012 here

And if you fancy catching up with Scott and many of the other online meducators he mentions in his Natural Seven list, including Minh Le Cong and Simon Carly, be sure to sign up for SMACC 2013, which will run in March.