Author Affiliation Kristi L. Koenig, MD University of California, Irvine, Center for Disaster Medical Sciences, Orange, California Frederick M. Burkle, Jr, MD Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Cambridge, Massachusetts LIMITS OF OUR CAPACITY The last 3 decades have seen a worldwide appreciation for advances in disaster medicine and public health preparedness that […]
Medical imaging now accounts for most of the US population’s exposure to ionizing radiation. A substantial proportion of this medical imaging is ordered in the emergency setting. We aim to provide a general overview of radiation dose from medical imaging with a focus on computed tomography, as well as a literature review of recent efforts to decrease unnecessary radiation exposure to patients in the emergency department setting.
An increasing number of elderly patients are presenting to the emergency department. Numerous studies have observed that emergency physicians often fail to identify and diagnose delirium in the elderly. These studies also suggest that even when emergency physicians recognized delirium, they still may not have fully appreciated the import of the diagnosis. Delirium is not a normal manifestation of aging and, often, is the only sign of a serious underlying medical condition. This article will review the significance, definition, and principal features of delirium so that emergency physicians may better appreciate, recognize, evaluate, and manage delirium in the elderly.
Teaching ability and efficiency of clinical operations are important aspects of physician performance. In order to promote excellence in education and clinical efficiency, it would be important to determine physician qualities that contribute to both. We sought to evaluate the relationship between teaching performance and patient throughput times.
The objective of this report is to determine physician assistant (PA) productivity in an academic emergency department (ED) and to determine whether shift length or department census impact productivity.
Measuring workplace performance is important to emergency department management. If an unreliable model is used, the results will be inaccurate. Use of inaccurate results to make decisions, such as how to distribute the incentive pay, will lead to rewarding the wrong people and will potentially demoralize top performers. This article demonstrates a statistical model to reliably measure the work accomplished, which can then be used as a performance measurement.
Patient care in the emergency department (ED) is often complicated by the inability to obtain an accurate prior history even when the patient is able to communicate with the ED staff. Personal health records (PHR) can mitigate the impact of such information gaps. This study assesses ED patients’ willingness to adopt a PHR and the treating physicians’ willingness to use that information.
The continual devaluation of emergency medical services by insurance payers will result in inadequate distribution of resources to emergency care, resulting in further emergency department closures, increases in emergency department crowding, and the demise of acute care services provided to families and communities.
The mean emergency department (ED) length of stay (LOS) is considered a measure of crowding. This paper measures the association between LOS and factors that potentially contribute to LOS measured over consecutive shifts in the ED: shift 1 (7:00 am to 3:00 pm), shift 2 (3:00 pm to 11:00 pm), and shift 3 (11:00 pm to 7:00 am).
We present a case of Wellens’ syndrome together with upright T wave in lead V1 in a man presenting with atypical chest pain, and we discuss the significance of its prompt recognition by the emergency physicians who are involved in the evaluation of patients with coronary artery disease in emergency departments.
We examine the association between self-reported alcohol misuse and alcohol use within 2 hours of having sex and the number of sexual partners among a sample of African-American and Latino emergency department (ED) patients.
As 5-year mortality rates for recidivism are as high as 20%, it is important to determine whether victims with a history of violent trauma are at increased risk for fatal outcome with their next trauma. We hypothesized that victims of violent trauma who have had 1 prior ED visit for violent trauma will have increased odds of fatal outcome.
This study used surveillance at trauma centers to identify incidents and parent interviews to obtain detailed information on incidents, vehicles, and children.
