Every Thursday morning at The Alfred ICU we spend an hour on practical teaching and training in airway and bronchoscopy skills. A common problem when novices perform laryngoscopy is failure to engage the hyoepiglottic ligament by properly seating the tip of the laryngoscope blade in the vallecula.

This can be hard to visualise… unless this you watch this video by the airway experts from the AIME course in Canada, as recently featured in EMCrit Podcast 142 – Airway Things I Learned from George Kovacs at the NYC Airway Course. This step is so important that George Kovacs even calls it “valleculoscopy”.