Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA
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Emerg Med Australas · Jun 2017
Intercollegiate conversations: Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists.
In the first of a series of online interviews with other Australian and New Zealand Specialty Colleges about the developments and shared challenges with implementing competency-based medical education, I spoke with the current Dean of Education at the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, Dr Ian Graham. Dr Graham is not an anaesthetist. ⋯ He was appointed into the role of part-time Dean of Education at the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists in August 2014. The interview was conducted in person on 13 April 2016 at Austin Hospital in Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia, and subsequent changes were made to the manuscript through email by Dr Graham on 28 August 2016.
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Emerg Med Australas · Jun 2017
Establishing a dedicated toxicology unit reduces length of stay of poisoned patients and saves hospital bed days.
This study evaluates the effect on the average length of stay (LOS), relative stay index (RSI), bed days and costs saved following the establishment of a dedicated clinical toxicology unit in an Australian tertiary referral hospital. ⋯ The reduction in average LOS is similar to results previously published by two Australian toxicology units over 15 years ago. Despite changes in healthcare delivery since this time, these results continue to support the efficiency and associated cost saving of a dedicated toxicology unit in managing poisoned patients.
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Emerg Med Australas · Jun 2017
The ED-inpatient dashboard: Uniting emergency and inpatient clinicians to improve the efficiency and quality of care for patients requiring emergency admission to hospital.
Patients who require emergency admission to hospital require complex care that can be fragmented, occurring in the ED, across the ED-inpatient interface (EDii) and subsequently, in their destination inpatient ward. Our hospital had poor process efficiency with slow transit times for patients requiring emergency care. ED clinicians alone were able to improve the processes and length of stay for the patients discharged directly from the ED. ⋯ The inpatient teams were uninterested in improving time-based measures of care in isolation, but they were motivated by improving patient outcomes. We developed a dashboard showing process measures such as 4 h rule compliance rate coupled with clinically important outcome measures such as inpatient mortality. The EDii dashboard helped unite both ED and inpatient teams in clinical redesign to improve both efficiencies of care and patient outcomes.