Inter-rater reliability of critical care transthoracic echocardiography findings amongst cardiac sonographers, junior clinicians and senior clinicians: a prospective study

The purpose of this trial is to assess the agreement between different groups performing critical care echocardiography. The three participant groups are sonographers, junior clinicians and senior clinicians. From each participant group, 3 will be randomly selected (via a random number generator) to perform a focussed transthoracic echocardiogram on a consented intensive care patient. These studies are expected to take approximately 15 minutes in duration (scanning time). The studies will be performed sequentially, all within a limited time frame of each other (target of 4 hours [half a day]) to have all of the studies performed on any given patient. The echocardiographic findings will not be used to guide patient care but are instead being used to assess agreement and reliability across the three participant groups.