The Regional Pediatric Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) Workshop, hosted on August 15, 2025 at Yale's West Campus Conference Center, was met with resounding success, attracting a full house of enthusiastic participants. It was led by Julie Leviter, MD (pediatric emergency medicine faculty at Yale) and Rahul Shah, MD (pediatric emergency medicine faculty at Connecticut Children’s), as a collaboration between multiple institutions. This year's workshop brought together 45 attendees comprising faculty, fellows, Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs), Physician Assistants (PAs), and nurses from various pediatric specialties, such as pediatric emergency medicine, pediatric hospital medicine, neonatology, and transport medicine.
The workshop offered specialized training tracks, empowering participants to choose between a general ultrasound track or focus areas like neonatology (led by Coby Kelner, DO, neonatologist at Connecticut Children’s) or regional analgesia (led by Zachary Binder, MD, pediatric emergency medicine faculty at UMass). This flexibility allowed attendees to tailor their learning experience to their specific interests and specialties.
Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive. Attendees lauded the workshop's educational value and engaging nature, with many highlighting the quality of the instruction and the excellent support provided by the teaching staff. Feedback from attendees emphasized the high caliber of the event. One said, "It was very educational and fun to learn new skills," and another mentioned, "The instructors were all amazing teachers." The high instructor-to-learner ratio and the ample hands-on practice time were particularly appreciated, as they enabled a more interactive and personalized learning environment.