Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA
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Emerg Med Australas · Feb 2016
Impact of a pilot pathway for the management of gastroenteritis-like symptoms in an emergency department: A case study following a Salmonella outbreak.
This research aims to describe the effect of standard care (control) versus a clinical management pathway (intervention) on patient length of stay and admission rates during a public health emergency at one Australian ED. ⋯ The length of stay for patients between the two groups was statistically different, suggesting that the implementation of a clinical management pathway for patients with gastroenteritis-like symptoms reduced the ED length of stay. This finding is useful in future planning for similar public health emergency responses and/or for use when patients present with gastroenteritis-like symptoms on a daily basis.
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Emerg Med Australas · Feb 2016
ReviewReview article: Staff perception of the emergency department working environment: Integrative review of the literature.
Employees in EDs report increasing role overload because of critical staff shortages, budgetary cuts and increased patient numbers and acuity. Such overload could compromise staff satisfaction with their working environment. This integrative review identifies, synthesises and evaluates current research around staff perceptions of the working conditions in EDs. ⋯ A key finding was that perceptions of working environment varied across clinical staff and study location, but that high levels of autonomy and teamwork offset stress around high pressure and high volume workloads. The large range of tools used to assess staff perception of working environment limits the comparability of the studies. A dearth of intervention studies around enhancing working environments in EDs limits the capacity to recommend evidence-based interventions to improve staff morale.