This is the podcast, ICU rounds.

My name is Dr. Jeffrey Guy.

I'm an associate professor of surgery and director of the Burns Center

at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

The topic that I'm going to discuss today is perhaps one of my favorite

numbers on a pulmonary artery catheter or a swan cancer's catheter. And that's the mixed

venous saturation of oxygen or what's typically known as the SVO2. We could debate whether swan

Gans catheters or PA catheters, whatever you prefer to call them, make differences in patient outcomes.

That's perhaps a topic for a different discussion.

It's been debated now for years.

I'm not a big fan of PA catheters.

I think my opinion the data shows that they haven't really changed the outcomes. But the question that remains from that is that the PA catheters. I think my opinion the data shows that they haven't really changed the

outcomes. But the question that remains from that is it the PA catheter itself, the piece of

plastic, or is it the person at the end of the PA catheter, the physician or the nurse

or the nurse who is caring for the patient, who isn't making the right decisions based on what

the numbers are showing.

Several years ago, I was giving a talk at what the Society of Critical Care Medicine calls their Critical Care Academy.

And most of the people in the room are medical, surgical, and anesthesia intensivists who are either board eligible or board certified in critical care

and taking this course as a review and they had one of those audience interaction kind of ask a question

and what is your answer A, B, and C and give you instant feedback.

And I was amazed standing there watching this lecture that was going right before mine,

how many people who are

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