Emergency airway management by intensive care unit nurses with the intubating laryngeal mask airway and the laryngeal tube

In-hospital CPR response teams may often include an ICU nurse, because of shortages in physicians who are experienced in CPR. Also, it is quite common that hospital departments are spread over different buildings, or over different floors within the same building. As such, many hospitals may not be able to dispatch experienced physicians to remote locations for prolonged periods of time in order to administer CPR, because this would leave ICU or even operation room patients unattended. Thus, ICU nurses who are in charge of an in-hospital attempt at CPR may be less clinically experienced than an anaesthesiologist, but have to carry full responsibility with regard to pharmacological interventions, and especially airway management. Hence, if such ICU nurses have, for whatever reason, either no extensive theoretical or practical experience in emergency airway management, then the CPR outcome may be jeopardized, for example because of ventilation-associated complications. Thus, if an airway device can be identified that is easy to handle for this group of carers, efforts at CPR may be more successful.