For our PocketSnips project at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) in 2007, we were able to create a range of videos to assist learners with common clinical procedures. Because our original project website at https://pocketsnips.org was not able to handle the volume of video requests, we published many of these videos on our Clinisnips channel on YouTube. This has remained highly successful for 17 hears so far.

One challenge that we faced was in creating videos of unusual procedures and the biggest challenge was on the topic of cranial burr holes, used for emergency reduction of intracranial pressure. This is rarely performed and the chances of getting our video team on site if such a procedure was actually performed was vanishingly small. So, in true sim style, we made one up, with help from Grey’s Anatomy.

Doing a Burr Hole in the field – why the heck would you want to do that?

These were created for the Slice of Life conference in 2007.

This is the second video snippet, showing our tips on how to perform the Burr Hole. We used a friendly Northern Ontario black bear who volunteered for this role.

Well, ok, it was not a real bear. But this material, showing how you can splice together content from various sources was very well received at the conference.

We are also very grateful to Disney for their permission to embed content from Grey’s Anatomy into our videos. They liked how we merged the fictional with the educational, and still had a bit of fun with it.

The PocketSnips Team