How the clinical content is written, reviewed and corrected

01

Who writes the clinical content

All clinical content on this website and in The Ship Doctor app — the simulation cases, the ECG material, the POCUS material, the clinical pathways, the calculators and the articles — is written by Dr Ezekiel Aluda Osolika (MBChB, DipPEC EM, FEBEM, MSc Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine), an emergency medicine physician with direct clinical experience in shipboard, expedition, aeromedical and remote-care settings.

There is no anonymous editorial team and no outsourced medical writing. The ORCID entry below is the author’s research and publication profile; ORCID is not a professional-registration or identity-verification service. The full background is on the About page:

• ORCID 0000-0001-9978-2265 — research and publication profile
• About the clinician behind The Ship Doctor
• Seatrade Cruise News coverage of the app

Where content is generated or drafted with software assistance, a clinician reviews and edits it before publication and remains accountable for it. Nothing is published straight from a generator.

02

How review is performed — and its current limits

Every case, pathway and article goes through the same internal process before it is published:

1. The clinical content is drafted against a named current guideline or reference, not from memory.
2. The decision points and any drug doses, thresholds and time targets are checked back against that source.
3. The scenario is checked for the setting it claims to teach — a case written for a ship must not assume equipment a ship does not carry.
4. Anything that cannot be sourced is either cut or explicitly labelled as a judgement call rather than a guideline position.

What this means for you: treat The Ship Doctor as clinician-authored training material, comparable to a well-referenced textbook chapter or teaching course written by one author — not as a peer-reviewed guideline, and not as a substitute for your own service's protocols.

03

Which guidelines and references are used

Clinical content is written against current published guidance from recognised bodies. The principal sources are:

• Resuscitation and life support — Resuscitation Council UK adult advanced life support guidelines and paediatric guidance from its 2025 resuscitation guidelines, European Resuscitation Council guidelines, and American Heart Association ACLS and PALS guidance where a scenario is framed for an AHA-certified reader.
• Acute coronary syndromes and ECG — 2023 European Society of Cardiology guidelines for the management of acute coronary syndromes, alongside standard 12-lead interpretation criteria.
• Sepsis — Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidance, adapted explicitly for settings without laboratory, critical care or vasopressor capability.
• Maritime and remote settings — the World Health Organization International Medical Guide for Ships (3rd edition) and the WHO International Health Regulations for port-state reporting.
• Ultrasound — published consensus statements on point-of-care ultrasound acquisition and interpretation, used for image recognition teaching only.

Individual articles carry their own reference list at the foot of the page, linked to the source document rather than to a summary of it. Where guidance differs between bodies — which it does, for example, on some drug doses and timing targets — the difference is stated rather than averaged away.

04

When it was last reviewed

This page records two different kinds of date. The policy date says when this governance statement was last revised. Each practice module has its own review date and content version, recorded when that module’s clinical content was checked. Neither changes when the site is rebuilt or restyled.

This governance policy last revised

8 September 2026

Site-wide clinical content review recorded with this policy

8 September 2026

Review interval

Clinical content is reviewed at least annually, and sooner for any topic where a source guideline is revised. Resuscitation, ACS and sepsis material is re-checked whenever the relevant body issues an update.

Articles that carry their own review date on the page are the authority for that article. If an article's date is older than the site-wide review date above, the article has not been re-reviewed since that date.

Practice module review records

“Author review” means the author checked the content; it is not an independent second review (see section 02).

05

How to report an error, and how corrections are handled

If you find something clinically wrong, out of date, or misleading — on the website or inside the app — report it. Corrections from readers are wanted, not merely tolerated.

How to report it

Email ezekiel@theshipdoctor.com with the subject line Clinical correction, or use the contact page. Please include the page URL or the app screen, the specific statement you are disputing, and the source you believe is correct.

What happens next

1. Acknowledgement — you get a reply confirming the report has been received.
2. Assessment — the statement is checked against the current source guidance.
3. Action — if it is wrong, it is corrected. A clinically significant correction — anything that could change a management decision, a dose or a time target — is corrected as a priority rather than held for the next review cycle.
4. Record — the page's review date is updated, and a note of what changed is added where the change is clinically significant rather than editorial.
5. Reply — you are told what was decided, including when the conclusion is that the original content was right.

Corrections are not silently rolled into unrelated edits, and a disputed point is not left standing simply because it would be inconvenient to change.

06

Scope and limits of this material

• The Ship Doctor is simulation and education only. It does not give advice about a specific patient and does not accept clinical information about one.
• It does not replace your local protocols, your medical direction, your employer's policies or your own clinical judgement. Where this material and your local protocol disagree, follow your local protocol.
• POCUS content teaches probe selection, acquisition concepts and image interpretation. Scanning competence is assessed at the bedside by a supervisor, not by an app.
• The app is not a medical device, does not carry a CE mark or FDA clearance, and makes no diagnostic claim.
• The app does not currently award CME or CPD credit. Any hours you claim are self-directed learning under your own regulator's rules.
• No claim is made on this site about clinical outcomes, patient safety improvements or research findings attributable to using the app, because no such study has been done.

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