OCB Media

As a cardiac technician I personally found the CD a very useful tool for revision in preparation for the BSE examination. I also felt that the self -assessment section was extremely useful and found it not to be too daunting.

A refresher for practicing doctors or health care professionals.

We would both like to know when the CD is to be published as it is a very informative and useful buy.

The CD-ROM has several advantages over a cardiology textbook, such as the ability to actually listen to the heart sounds described. The section on aortic stenosis, for example, allows you to hear how the murmur sounds over all four areas of the chest (pulmonary, tricuspid, mitral, aortic) as well as how it radiates to the carotids. The images included (for example echocardiography) are of good quality with clear explanations corresponding to each one. In addition to this it is actually possible to watch important procedures take place.

One thing that impressed me with this CD was the applied section of knowledge. It was of immense use to be able to actually hear first hand what different heart murmurs sound like, as it will help me to identify them when I hear them myself in a clinical setting. The ECG traces were useful as only the relevant information was presented, taking away the confusing extra bits that make understanding ECGs difficult at this stage of education. It was also useful to get a picture of different chest x-ray cardiology presentations, and this has proved of immense help for my radiological development. The excellent combination of information and audio / visual aids provides a detailed look at cardiac disease, and, in my opinion, improves competence in approaching patients with this type of disease.

I was most impressed with the explanation into symptoms, clinical findings, and investigations on the CD. It was extremely useful to be able to hear heart murmurs, view the relevant details of ECGs and chest X-rays, and see how an Echocardiogram could help to diagnose a problem. Another aspect to the program that I found useful was the two-way approach to the clinical problems; a user can either select a particular problem and see the symptoms that this may demonstrate, or can view a list of common symptoms, each with it’s own differential diagnosis, to get to a clinical problem. I believe that this has improved my own ability to make informed decisions about collections of symptoms, something which, as a student who has only spent two weeks working in a clinical environment, does not come naturally to me.

In summary, it is my opinion that this program would be an worthy addition to the clinical information used by any medical student at any stage of their clinical attachment. It uses an excellent combination of the information that could be found in a clinical textbook, together with media that would otherwise only be available on the ward and in a patient with a ‘classic’ case. I found it very useful to my studies, even in the brief period I used it. I, as a student, would happily pay the price of £30 currently proposed for this program, as I would expect to pay this much for a good textbook on the same subject.