Emergency airway management often rapidly evolves in varied circumstances and it is impossible to write a guideline that would cover all circumstances where these techniques may be required.

Generally speaking the two main indications for FONA are:

• CICO scenarios
• Scenarios where it is deemed intubation would be impossible and FONA is employed as the primary strategy, e.g. severe maxillofacial trauma or known obstructing upper airway tumour

The main objective of FONA is to oxygenate the patient. As it is a rare procedure usually done in an in extremis situation it needs to be simple, using equipment that is familiar and able to yield a high first pass success rate.

The results from NAP4 suggest it would also be sensible if that method would protect from aspiration and ideally, enable normal CO₂ clearance.