Clinicians who work in anesthesiology, intensive care or emergency medicine who are involved in the management of respiratory failure must understand the problem of failure to ventilate: “can’t breathe, won’t breathe.” This long tutorial covers a lot of ground and could be viewed in split sessions.

My principle goal is to give you the tools to work the problem of respiratory failure. Along the way I introduce the alveolar gas equation, ventilation perfusion matching and lung volumes; particularly functional residual capacity. In the second half (from 28:20 onwards), I discuss anatomical and physiological dead space, calculate out the dead space to tidal volume ratio and show how you can be inadvertently increasing physiologic dead space by applying PEEP or neglecting auto-PEEP.

Even if you think you know a lot about this subject, I guarantee that you will learn something.

As always, I welcome feedback.