Advanced Airway Management
Your Go-To for Advanced Airway How-To's

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Driving the Scope
Be they asleep or awake, knowing some basics about the scope you're using, including how to drive it, will smooth out your fiberoptic intubation attempts.

There are only 6 basic scope movements
1. Flex & Retroflex
2. Rotate right & Rotate left
3. Advance & Withdraw

Keep the scope STRAIGHT
Doing so ensures that any left/right rotation of the scope body will translate into the same right/left rotation of the scope tip (i.e. and thus the view on the screen in front of you)

Use an oral airway
It will improve your view, maintain oral airway patency, and protect your scope from biting teeth
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Center your target
If the vocal cords are centered on your screen, they are centered beneath your scope
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Gentle Jaw Thrust
Maximizes oropharyngeal space AND encourages the oral airway to stay in the mouth and in the midline.
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Other Maneuvering Tips
Deep inspiration/sniff will open the vocal cords (useful with railroading the ETT)
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There are only 6 basic scope movements
Any other scope manipulations will not produce predictable movements of the distal end of the scope.
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Keep your scope straight
For our shorter colleagues, achieving this may require a low OR table and/or step stools

KEEP IT MIDLINE
Ask the patient to bite gently on the oral airway. This prevents it from popping out, which invariably always forces the oral airway off the midline.
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KEEP IT MIDLINE
A crooked oral airway guides your scope lateral and AWAY from the cords. Best case scenario, this is frustrating. Worst case, the whole procedure risks failure.

If the patient DOES cough
Coughing will elevate the larynx. Aiming scope for the anterior commissure of cords will ultimately center the scope with coughing