Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA
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Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2015
FOAMSearch.net: A custom search engine for emergency medicine and critical care.
The number of online resources read by and pertinent to clinicians has increased dramatically. However, most healthcare professionals still use mainstream search engines as their primary port of entry to the resources on the Internet. These search engines use algorithms that do not make it easy to find clinician-oriented resources. ⋯ Using Google™ algorithms, it searches a vetted list of >300 blogs, podcasts, wikis, knowledge translation tools, clinical decision support tools and medical journals. Utilisation has increased progressively to >3000 users/month since its launch in 2011. Further study of the role of CSEs to find medical resources is needed, and it might be possible to develop similar CSEs for other areas of medicine.
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Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2015
Mechanisms, injuries and helmet use in cyclists presenting to an inner city emergency department.
The objectives of the present study were to describe the injury profiles of cyclists presenting to an ED and determine the risk of significant head injury associated with bicycle helmet use. ⋯ Head injuries were common after inner city cycling incidents. The use of helmets was associated with a reduction in significant head injury.
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Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2015
Use of a syndromic surveillance system to describe the trend in cycling-related presentations to emergency departments in Sydney.
To describe population-based trends in cycling-related presentations to EDs over the past decade. ⋯ Using an ED syndromic surveillance system, cycling-related ED presentation rates in Sydney Australia have increased in those aged 35 years and over the past 10 years, with a relative decrease in the proportion of deaths in ED or those requiring critical care admission.
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Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2015
Observational StudyInterrater agreement between expert and novice in measuring inferior vena cava diameter and collapsibility index.
In critical care medicine, US views of the inferior vena cava (IVC) and its change with respiration are used to estimate the intravascular volume status of unwell patients and, in particular, to answer the question: 'Is this patient likely to be fluid responsive?' Most commonly in the literature, the subxiphisternal (SX) window in the longitudinal plane is utilised. To date, no study has specifically assessed interrater agreement in estimating IVC diameter between emergency medicine specialists (experts) and trainees (learners). ⋯ The wide 95% limits of agreement demonstrate a poor interrater agreement between the IVC US measurements obtained by expert and learner users in the assessment of fluid status. These ranges are greater than clinically acceptable.