Clinical trial recruitment and retention of individuals who use substances are challenging in any setting and can be particularly difficult in emergency department (ED) settings. This article discusses strategies for optimizing recruitment and retention in substance use research conducted in EDs.
Methamphetamine use is on the rise with increasing emergency department (ED) visits, behavioral health crises, and deaths associated with use and overdose. Emergency clinicians describe methamphetamine use as a significant problem with high resource utilization and violence against staff, but little is known about the patient’s perspective. In this study our objective was to identify the motivations for initiation and continued methamphetamine use among people who use methamphetamine and their experiences in the ED to guide future ED-based approaches.
In 2021, a large Midwestern university began selling alcohol to spectators within the football stadium for the first time. The stadium routinely hosts >65,000 spectators, and drinking alcohol is highly prevalent at pre-game tailgating events. Our goal in this study was to determine the impact of in-stadium alcohol sales on the incidence of alcohol-related emergency department (ED) visits and local emergency medical services (EMS) calls. We hypothesized that the availability of alcohol throughout the stadium would lead to an increase in alcohol-related patient presentations.
Undocumented immigrants are excluded from benefits that help compensate for scheduled outpatient hemodialysis (HD), compelling them to use emergency departments (ED) for HD. Consequently, these patients can receive “emergency-only” HD after presenting to the ED with critical illness due to untimely dialysis. Our objective was to describe the impact of emergency-only HD on hospital cost and resource utilization in a large academic health system that includes public and private hospitals.
As the significance of social workers (SW) in improving healthcare delivery in the emergency department (ED) continues to expand, emergency physicians will increasingly be expected to effectively partner with SWs in both academic and community settings. In this scoping review we sought to provide evidence-based recommendations for effective emergency clinician educational interventions on how to incorporate SWs in the ED to address health-related social needs while also identifying directions for future research.
Few studies have examined the impact of emergency department (ED) social interventions on patient outcomes and revisits, especially in underserved populations. Our objective in this study was to characterize a volunteer initiative that provided community medical and social resources at ED discharge and its effect on ED revisit rates and adherence to follow-up appointments at a large, county hospital ED.
While emergency department (ED) crowding has deleterious effects on patient care outcomes and operational efficiency, impacts on the experience for patients discharged from the ED are unknown. We aimed to study how patient-reported experience is affected by ED crowding to characterize which factors most impact discharged patient experience.
Prolonged emergency department (ED) length of stay (LOS) has been shown to adversely affect patient care. We sought to determine factors associated with ED LOS via analysis of a large, national, ED operations database.
Law enforcement officers (LEO) interact with patients and clinicians in the emergency department (ED) for many reasons. There is no current consensus on what should comprise, or how to best enact, guidelines that ideally balance LEO activities in the service of public safety with patient health, autonomy, and privacy. The purpose of this study was to explore how a national sample of emergency physicians (EP) perceives activities of LEOs during the delivery of emergency medical care.
“Excited delirium” (ExD) is purported to represent a certain type of agitated state that can lead to unexpected death. The 2009 “White Paper Report on Excited Delirium Syndrome,” authored by the American College of Emergency Medicine (ACEP) Excited Delirium Task Force, continues to play a pivotal role in defining ExD. Since that report was produced, there has been an increasing appreciation that the label has been applied more often to Black people.
English proficiency and race are both independently known to affect surgical access and quality, but relatively little is known about the impact of race and limited English proficiency (LEP) on admission for emergency surgery from the emergency department (ED). Our objective was to examine the influence of race and English proficiency on admission for emergency surgery from the ED.
Urine drug screens (UDS) have unproven clinical utility in emergency department (ED) chest pain presentations. A test with such limited clinical utility may exponentiate biases in care, but little is known about the epidemiology of UDS use for this indication. We hypothesized that UDS utilization varies nationally across race and gender.
Food insecurity (FI) has been associated with adverse health outcomes and increased healthcare expenditures. Many families experienced reduced access to food during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. A 2019 study revealed that the pre-pandemic prevalence of FI at an urban, tertiary care hospital’s emergency department (ED) was 35.3%. We sought to evaluate whether the prevalence of FI in the same ED patient population increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Emergency medicine (EM) residency programs have variable approaches to educating residents on recognizing and managing healthcare disparities. We hypothesized that our curriculum with resident-presented lectures would increase residents’ sense of cultural humility and ability to identify vulnerable populations.
Debriefing is a critical element in healthcare, both in the clinical environment and in the simulation lab. Often, what is said at a debriefing is not recorded, leading to loss of critical data that could be used to inform future simulations, education, and systems improvement. In this perspective piece, we explain the powerful role that capturing debriefing data can have for identifying themes to improve learners’ knowledge and skills, as well as inform data-driven systems change and initiatives.
