A Handy Small Animal Emergency App
Every once in a while you hear about something very useful, yet you didn’t even know it existed. This is one of those stories.
Meet the Small Animal Emergency Medicine App. In collaboration with UK-based emergency vet Shailen Jasani, DACVECC (of Veterinary ECC podcast fame), Kimba Veterinary Apps launched a comprehensive small animal emergency medicine app in late 2015 for all your emergency and critical care needs.
Of note, the content does not appear to be peer-reviewed.
Nonetheless, it is very useful as a quick reference guide for the busy small animal veterinarian, it contains a wealth of knowledge, tackling everything from triaging the emergency patient to tutorials for performing emergency procedures like thoracocentesis or stomach decompression to providing guidelines for management of specific conditions.
While the individual chapters delve into quite a bit of theory, the app also contains a chapter titled “ Quick check data” which, like the name suggests, contains information that can be accessed in a hurry: CPR drug dosages, potassium and glucose supplementation, and more. Separate portions of the app are also dedicated to aspects of emergency work that warrant special consideration, like transfusion medicine and pediatric patients.
The app has some handy features, such as working in offline mode and having a version optimized for use on the iPad.
The gallery page contains nearly 70 images for reference including radiographs, ECG strips, and blood smears from emergency patients. In addition, the app contains a drug formulary and calculators for CRI’s and fluid therapy.
The app is available for iOS devices from the Apple App Store and, as its contents could fill a large pocketbook, is definitely worth its modest price of under $15.
About the Author
Dr. Marit Veeber is a small animal clinician from Estonia. Her special interests include emergency and internal medicine. In her spare time she likes to read, hike, take pictures of stuff and play around with mobile apps. She also tweets about veterinary medicine and manages social media for the European Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society.
