Point-of-Care Ultrasound Workshops

Why Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS)?

Many veterinarians think ultrasound is just for finding fluid. But POCUS has evolved into so much more — now answering over 25 clinical questions across the abdomen, pleural space, lungs, heart, and vascular system. It's a practical, everyday clinical decision-making tool, and anyone can learn it — whether you work in general practice or emergency medicine.

Recent surveys suggest 50–80% of veterinary clinics already have an ultrasound machine. If yours is only being used to find the bladder for a urine sample — it's time to change that. And if you don't have one yet, come and find out what you're missing.

You've all seen cases like these:

• A 10-year-old Golden Retriever with chronic cough, normal bloods, and unremarkable radiographs — is there something being missed?
• A dog presents with bite wounds over the abdomen — has the cavity been penetrated?
• A dog has occasional regurgitation 48 hours post-anaesthesia — does it have ileus?
• A small breed dog has a murmur and dyspnea — should you give furosemide?
• A cat is too unstable to radiograph — what's causing the dyspnea?
• A Great Dane collapses and you can barely hear the heart — DCM or pericardial effusion?

• Answer over 25 evidence-based binary clinical questions across the abdomen, pleural space, lungs, heart, and vascular system
• Hands-on practice with live dogs across all POCUS systems: abdomen, pleural space, lung, cardiovascular, and vascular access
• No prior ultrasound experience required — basic machine function and probe handling covered from the ground up
• Designed for veterinarians in everyday practice — whether that's general practice or emergency medicine

Add POCUS to your personal or practice toolkit and improve diagnostic confidence, patient outcomes, and client satisfaction.

Regional workshops

We travel with ultrasound machines so you can experience hands-on POCUS training with leaders in the field and see how much POCUS can add to your clinical practice. For regional workshops, we do need your help in sourcing the dog volunteers to make these workshops happen, and will reach out to you after you have registered.

Workshop faculty

Professors Søren Boysen and Serge Chalhoub from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Calgary, Canada, and Dr Pamela Manning from the Sydney School of Veterinary Science, will be joined by A/Prof Claire Sharp and Dr Corrin Boyd from Murdoch’s School of Veterinary Medicine to deliver the first ever POCUS training in WA!  

Søren, a criticalist, and Serge, an internist, rarely agree on anything, but their combined expertise and shared humour make for a highly engaging learning environment. 

Training

• Half-day training with 5 POCUS experts
• Small group learning with 4 participants per instructor
• 8 hours of online lectures included (prerequisite for attending the training) through Calgary Veterinary POCUS Training Academy (included in workshop price and managed for you by CAVE)
• The workshop (including the 8 hrs of RACE approved CE upon completion of the online modules), has a total CPD value of 16 points

Training content - POCUS for everyday practice

The 4 hr training will build on the interactive online lectures which are a pre-requisite to the lab. 

Through practical, hands-on training using live dogs, you will have the opportunity to learn and practice all of the common veterinary POCUS techniques currently used to assess the abdomen, pleural space, lung, and heart. Phantom training models will also be used to demonstrate and practice ultrasound guided vascular access using both in and out of plane techniques.

This lab will focus on techniques developed by the instructors, designed to increase veterinary POCUS diagnostic accuracy, and help facilitate easier application into everyday veterinary practice. These are all techniques that can be performed by any practitioner and should be used in everyday practice! We will also briefly review basic ultrasound machine function and probe manipulations.

Workshop outline

Afternoon workshop registrations commence at 1pm and the training wraps up at 5.30pm.

Futher reading: Positive impact of POCUS in human medicine

Assessing the clinical relevance of point-of-care ultrasound for hospitalists: Influence on clinical reasoning and decision-making

Notes

• Online lecture access is at the rate advertised by the Calgary Training Academy at CA$300 and included in the workshop ticket; there is no mark-up by CAVE; upon registration we will supply you with an access code for the lectures.
•  If you are a practice owner and are intending to send your staff to the training, we can prepare an invoice for you.
• Regional workshops: we will be reaching out to you as we need workshop participants to supply the dog volunteers needed to make these workshops happen.
• If the workshops sell out before you have had a chance to register, please reach out to us through cave@murdoch.edu.au and if there is enough interest for a further workshop, we will hold it either on Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
• In the event that a workshop does not have the required registrations by the week prior to the workshop, we will combine registrations to ensure all workshops are fully subscribed and reserve the right to cancel a workshop.

Sponsors

This WA POCUS Festival is proudly sponsored by: