Ultrasound with probe

The first thing I would say is that everything has to be perpendicular. It doesn't win your experience, but if you're a few degrees out and you're just learning, it's really, really difficult. So it's worth trying to get everything at right angles. So get your probe at the right angle to the limb, make sure everything is lined up. You can see here on the screen, we're about a centimetre and a half below the surface. So you really need to be about a centimetre and a half back and at 45 degrees. Now, one of the problems really is is that a lot of people will hold their needle with their three fingers beneath it but you can never really get it flat enough so I turn my hand around and I actually use my fourth finger as a kind of a rest and it allows me the flexibility to either go shallow or to go deep. So once I get myself lined up at 45 degrees I should hit the target and in fact you can see there we're absolutely spot on, maybe a little bit too deep, but we're right there. And if I'm not right, I do have the capacity to move my needle one way or the other, which I wouldn't necessarily have if I had all three fingers wedged between the patient and the end of the needle.