NYSORA’s Self Knowledge Assessment

Regional anesthesia and acute pain medicine protocols are rapidly changing. Introduction of ultrasound in interventional pain management and regional anesthesia has led to substantial changes in practice management, protocols, techniques, and applications, and their effects on patient safety and efficacy. Nearly all anesthesiology journals now incorporate a section on regional anesthesia and acute pain medicine. This evolution of the practice and expansion of new knowledge mandates frequent updates through continuous medical education. While the didactic knowledge of regional anesthesia and acute pain medicine is available in anesthesiology textbooks, a compendium of information for the purpose of knowledge assessment in the subspecialty does not exist. Hence, NYSORA’s Textbook of Regional Anesthesia and Acute Pain Management aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive databank of questions that can be used to test students’ knowledge and clinical reasoning regarding new developments in the field. In making this book, we have selected a team of opinion leaders throughout the world and paired them with students of anesthesiology in order to prepare the questions and logical answers. The questions are organized in specific sections, whereas the answers are provided from NYSORA’s textbooks and relevant additional literature citations. To our knowledge, this is the first question book that focuses on the rapidly developing subspecialty of regional anesthesia and acute pain management and point-of-care ultrasound-guided interventional analgesia and anesthesia. With this volume we primarily aim at students of anesthesiology, but the question bank can also be used to assess knowledge acquisition of fellows in regional anesthesia and acute pain medicine, and/or to test the knowledge of applicants for the diploma in regional anesthesia (eg, EDRA, European Diploma of Regional Anesthesia, administered by ESRA, the European Society for Regional Anesthesia). We hope that this question book will be useful in assessing knowledge acquisition. We invite comments and suggestions for future editions and also look forward to developing this ques- tion book into a global knowledge assessment test.