Clinical governance

How the clinical content is written, reviewed and corrected

The Ship Doctor teaches emergency decisions. That only works if you can see where the content comes from, who stands behind it, and what happens when it is wrong. This page answers those questions without qualification.

Clinical content last reviewed: 8 September 2026

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. You can check the registration and publication record on the ORCID entry, and read the full background on the About page:

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.

How review is performed — and its current limits

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

The clinical content is drafted against a named current guideline or reference, not from memory.
The decision points and any drug doses, thresholds and time targets are checked back against that source.
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.
Anything that cannot be sourced is either cut or explicitly labelled as a judgement call rather than a guideline position.

Stated plainly: there is currently no named independent external reviewer. Review is performed by the author, who is a practising emergency physician, and not by a second clinician independent of the product. That is a real limitation and we are not going to describe it as anything else. If and when an independent reviewer is appointed, this page will name them, state their registration and describe the scope of what they review, and the review date below will change.

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.

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 and paediatric advanced life support 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 — European Society of Cardiology acute coronary syndrome guidelines, 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.

When it was last reviewed

Clinical content last reviewed: 8 September 2026
This governance statement last updated: 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 date above, the article has not been re-reviewed since that date.

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

Acknowledgement — you get a reply confirming the report has been received.
Assessment — the statement is checked against the current source guidance.
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.
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.
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.

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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