Hi and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Simon Lang and I'm joined today by Zafkissim,

who's an EM consultant over in the States. Hi Z Zaf. Hi, Simon. Thanks for having me.

It's, you know, I've been listening to your podcast for a while. I really enjoyed it, so it's an

honor to be a part of it today. Very kind. And I understand you've got up ridiculously early in

the morning to do it. So many, many thanks. So we're going to run through a topic which came up in one of the papers from

February's papers of the month, which was about needle decompression for tension

pneumothorices.

And I understand you've done quite a bit of work on this in the past.

Yeah, it came actually at a pretty timely period.

I was just finishing presenting to our weekly

educational conference about issues surrounding chest trauma, and this was part of it. So when you

posted your paper, it came at the right time. And this kind of interested me because I'd seen through

my career a few cases where perhaps it hadn't been placed quite so correctly in terms of needle decompression, either not decompressing appropriately or even one case I remember distinctly where it resulted in a major vascular injury.

So I thought we should look at it and see if we could do things better.

Sounds like a good idea.

And is that in the context of trauma or is that in the context of a spontaneous

or a non-traumatic tension pneumothorax?

I think certainly the complications I'd seen were related to traumatic injury, but we tend to use these in both scenarios, medical, as well as traumatic tension pneumatoresis.

And so I think the lessons that we learned from reviewing the literature can be applied to both populations.

Okay, so the paper that we talked about back in February was by Larn, and that was entitled

Chess War Thickness and Decompression Failure, and that was a systematic review and metronalysis

comparing anatomic locations in needle thoracostomy.

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