Loïc Delplanque, The Imelda Hospital, Belgium

Please briefly describe who are you and your institution.

I’m an anesthesiologist working as a senior staff member in the anesthesia department of a tertiary regional hospital.

In our center we perform major abdominal, orthopedic, neurosurgical, thoraco-vascular and cardiac surgery. Our surgeons perform challenging interventions on even more challenging patients in- and outside the OR.

I also teach an anesthesiology course in college to nurses doing a bachelor's in intensive care and emergency medicine.

What was life like before you had ClinicalKey? OR What problem(s) were you attempting to solve with ClinicalKey?

In our department we have a closet somewhere in the OR with a collection of mostly outdated reference works on anesthesia.

In the last decade, I have also assembled my own collection of anesthesia e-books. But to access all these e-books I needed as many as four different apps.

This made finding information to prepare a special case or a lecture a hard and time-consuming activity.

Nowadays we perform more and more invasive procedures on very sick patients outside the OR. Even in these remote places you still want access to all essential works. Before we used ClinicalKey, this was almost impossible.

What are three benefits that you’ve experienced since using ClinicalKey? OR What are the three most significant improvements you’ve seen since working with Elsevier?

First of all, you have access to several reference anesthesia textbooks such as Kaplan’s Cardiac Anesthesia, Miller’s Anesthesia, Stoelting’s Anesthesia and Co-existing Disease, and Nunn’s Applied Respiratory Physiology.

Second, you can access that information fast and easily on any computer or device with internet access. That way you have all the information you want, wherever and whenever you need it.

Finally, but most importantly, the information you’re looking for is up-to-date and reliable.

How do you use ClinicalKey in your day-to-day workflow?

Most frequently I use it in the OR to prepare for a case where the patient has a rare disease. Especially in the emergency setting, I’ve been grateful several times that I could adapt my anesthetic plan in a quick, easy and reliable way.

It’s also been useful during pre-op clinics where I could access that information while the patient was still in the office to check if extra tests were needed.

Apart from that, I use ClinicalKey to prepare lectures and colleges on anesthesia for nurses and other specialties.

What’s the primary reason that you would recommend ClinicalKey? OR If you had a colleague that was considering ClinicalKey, what would you tell them?

The easiest, most flexible and fastest way to access essential and reliable information where and when you need it.