Dr. Aspler is a member of Global Health Emergency Medicine, the Ultrasound Leadership Academy, the Canadian Association of Emergency Physician’s Ultrasound section, and speaker at Canada’s national EM update.
As the co-director of Ultrasound at the Toronto Addis Ababa Academic Collaboration and with Global Health Emergency medicine, she is supporting clinicians in less resource-rich areas to become local experts in developing their point-of-care ultrasound programming.
Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) imaging is poised to become a primary imaging modality in emergency departments across the globe with the advent of handheld ultrasound (US) machines – analogous to the proliferation of mobile phones over landlines in many developing countries. Over the past twenty years, resource-rich settings have developed infrastructure for POCUS programs which include department-level POCUS directors, guidelines on minimum standards for images obtained, archiving of images, report generation, and a mechanism for quality assurance.
Less resource-rich centers almost never have these supports. Quality Assurance(QA) is even more critical in settings where POCUS findings may not be verified with a radiology scan. Access to radiology may be limited due to patient costs, or a lack of formal imaging availability. For many international emergency graduates working in settings outside urban areas, this may be the sole diagnostic test readily available.