Introduction: Healthcare and social workers have the highest incidence of workplace violence of any industry. Our goal was to develop and evaluate an instrument for prospective collection of data relevant to emergency department (ED) violence against healthcare workers.
Conclusion: This survey instrument is the first tool shown to be accurate and reliable in characterizing acts of violence in the ED across all demographic and employment groups using filmed vignettes of violent acts. Gender and occupation of ED workers does not appear to play a significant role in perception of severity workplace violence.
We report a case of a caustic exposure presenting to the emergency department (ED) from the improper use of a food product. The ingested substance in our case was an alkali solution used to heat the product. OnTech® Hillside made several self-heating food product canisters, such as coffee and soup containers.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published significant data and trends related to opioid prescription pain relievers (OPR). In 2008, 20,044 deaths were attributed to prescription drug overdose of which 14,800 (73.8%) were due to OPR, an amount greater than the number of overdose deaths from heroin and cocaine combined.
Introduction: Drug-seeking behavior (DSB) in the emergency department (ED) is a very common problem, yet there has been little quantitative study to date of such behavior. The goal of this study was to assess the frequency with which drug seeking patients in the ED use classic drug seeking behaviors to obtain prescription medication.
Conclusion: Drug-seeking patients appear to exhibit “classically” described drug-seeking behaviors with only low to moderate frequency. Reliance on historical features may be inadequate when trying to assess whether or not a patient is drug-seeking.
