Emergency medicine Australasia : EMA
-
Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2013
'To teach or not to teach?' Factors that motivate and constrain Australian emergency medicine physicians to teach medical students.
Clinical teaching in the ED is crucial to the education of medical students. We attempted to identify and describe Australian emergency physicians who are currently clinical teachers and to elicit the factors that motivate and constrain them to teach. ⋯ Although most emergency physicians are willing to teach, systemic and university factors associated with teaching medical students acted against success of this outcome.
-
Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2013
2010-2011 Queensland floods: using Haddon's Matrix to define and categorise public safety strategies.
The 2010-2011 Queensland floods resulted in the most deaths from a single flood event in Australia since 1916. This article analyses the information on these deaths for comparison with those from previous floods in modern Australia in an attempt to identify factors that have contributed to those deaths. Haddon's Matrix, originally designed for prevention of road trauma, offers a framework for understanding the interplay between contributing factors and helps facilitate a clearer understanding of the varied strategies required to ensure people's safety for particular flood types. ⋯ The present study and its integration of research findings and conceptual frameworks might assist governments and communities to develop policies and strategies to prevent flood injury and fatalities.
-
Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2013
Introduction of an accelerated diagnostic protocol in the assessment of emergency department patients with possible acute coronary syndrome: the Nambour Short Low-Intermediate Chest pain project.
Emergency physicians can feel pressured by opposing forces of clinical reality and the need to publish successful key performance indicators in an environment of increasing demands and cost containment. This is particularly relevant to management of patients with undifferentiated chest pain and possible acute coronary syndrome. ⋯ We report findings from the Nambour Short Low-Intermediate Chest pain risk trial, which safely introduced an accelerated diagnostic protocol with reduced ED length of stay and high patient acceptability. Over a 7-month period, there were no major adverse cardiac events by 30 days in 19% of undifferentiated chest pain presentations with possible acute coronary syndrome discharged after normal sensitive cardiac troponin taken 2 h after presentation and scheduled to return for outpatient exercise stress test.