Article Text
Abstract
Necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) is a serious inflammatory bowel disease of prematurity with potentially devastating complications and remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality among premature infants. In recent years, there has been accumulating data regarding benefits of using bowel ultrasound (BUS) in the diagnosis and management of NEC. Despite this, adoption of robust BUS programmes into clinical practice has been slow. As BUS is a relatively new technique, many barriers to implementation exist, namely lack of education and training for sonographers and radiologists, low case volume and unfamiliarity by clinicians regarding how to use the information provided. The aim of this manuscript is to provide a framework and a roadmap for units to implement BUS in day-to-day practice for NEC diagnosis and management.
- paediatric surgery
- gastroenterology
- imaging
- intensive care
- multidisciplinary team-care
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Contributors KMA: writing, submitting author and no disclosures. SSC: advising, editing, images and imaging knowledge. EO: writing, editing, images, imaging knowledge and advising. AC: neonatology clinical knowledge, clinical questions writing and editing. JDF and SS: paediatric surgery knowledge and editing. MK: corresponding author, conceptualised manuscript, advising, editing, neonatology clinical knowledge and insights.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests SSC reports grants and personal fees from Jazz pharmaceuticals, outside the submitted work.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data sharing is not applicable as no datasets are generated and/or analysed for this study. Not applicable.
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