Journal of hospital medicine : an official publication of the Society of Hospital Medicine
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To assist busy hospital medicine clinicians, we summarized 10 impactful articles from last year. The authors reviewed articles published between March 2018-April 2019 for the Hospital Medicine Updates at the Society of Hospital Medicine and the Society of General Internal Medicine Annual Meetings. The authors voted to select 10 of 30 presented articles based on quality and clinical impact for this summary. The key findings include: (1) Vancomycin or fidaxomicin are the first-line treatment for initial Clostridioides difficile infection; (2) Unnecessary supplemental oxygen is linked to increased mortality; aim for a target oxygen saturation of 90%-94% in most hospitalized patients; (3) Stigmatizing language in medical records impacts physician trainees' attitudes and pain management practices; (4) Consider ablation for atrial fibrillation in patients with heart failure; (5) Patients with opioid use disorder should be offered buprenorphine or methadone therapy; (6) Apixaban is safe and may be preferable over warfarin in patients with atrial fibrillation and end-stage kidney disease; (7) It is probably safe to discontinue antimethicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) coverage in patients with hospital-acquired pneumonia who are improving and have negative cultures; (8) Selected patients with left-sided endocarditis (excluding MRSA) may switch from intravenous (IV) to oral antibiotics if they are clinically stable after 10 days; (9) Oral antibiotics may be equivalent to IV antibiotics in patients with joint and soft tissue infections; (10) A history-electrocardiogram-age-risk factors-troponin (HEART) score ≥4 is a reliable threshold for determining the patients who are at risk for short-term major adverse cardiac events and may warrant further evaluation.
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Why is this important?
Buprenorphine (Subutex, Tamgesic, Suboxone, Norspan) is a partial opioid agonist with high mu-receptor affinity, though limited by a ceiling effect. Because of its favourable safety profile it is used for opioid dependence, chronic and, increasingly, acute pain.1
Patients historically often have regular buprenorphine (BUP) ceased post-operatively when needing opioid analgesia. It was assumed that because of it’s high mu-receptor affinity, BUP blocks the efficacy of additional opioid analgesics. In reality, ceasing buprenorphine creates more complexity and may precipitate acute withdrawal.
Be smart
Haber, DeFries & Martin point out that despite the high receptor affinity of BUP, there are still additional receptors remaining for full-agonist opioids to bind and activate. This is supported by the literature (Kornfeld 2010 & Harrison 2018). Even in the post-operative period buprenorphine can be easily continued, although with patients sometimes needing higher doses of acute opioid analgesics (Goel 2019 & Hansen 2016).
“Temporarily discontinuing buprenorphine introduces unnecessary complexity to a hospitalization, places the patient at risk of exacerbation of pain, opioid withdrawal...“
Bottom-line
If buprenorphine is regularly being taken then it should not be ceased for hospital admission. Additional short-acting opioids can be added if needed. Doses required may be higher, but this is primarily due to opioid tolerance rather than receptor competition with BUP. Alternatively, a maintenance BUP dose can be split into 3-4 divided doses and/or increased to cover acute analgesic needs.
summary
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Buprenorphine is also a kappa and delta receptor antagonist, a weak partial NOP/Nociceptin receptor agonist, and has potent local anaesthetic effects. It behaves as a full agonist for analgesia in the opioid-naive, but a partial agonist for respiratory depression. ↩
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Observational Study
Nurse Responses to Physiologic Monitor Alarms on a General Pediatric Unit.
Hospitalized children generate up to 152 alarms per patient per day outside of the intensive care unit. In that setting, as few as 1% of alarms are clinically important. How nurses make decisions about responding to alarms, given an alarm's low specificity for detecting clinical deterioration, remains unclear. ⋯ Nurses rely on clinical and contextual details to determine how to respond to alarms. Few of the alarm responses in our study resulted in a clinical intervention. These findings suggest that multiple system-level and educational interventions may be necessary to improve the efficacy and safety of continuous monitoring.
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Appropriate calibration of clinical reasoning is critical to becoming a competent physician. Lack of follow-up after transitions of care can present a barrier to calibration. This study aimed to implement structured feedback about clinical reasoning for residents performing overnight admissions, measure the frequency of diagnostic changes, and determine how feedback impacts learners' self-efficacy. ⋯ Surveys evaluated comfort with sharing feedback, self-efficacy in identifying and mitigating cognitive biases' negative effects, and perceived educational value of night admissions-all of which improved after implementation. Analysis of 544 forms revealed a 43.7% diagnostic change rate spanning the transition from night-shift to day-shift providers; of the changes made, 29% (12.7% of cases overall) were major changes. This study suggests that structured feedback on clinical reasoning for overnight admissions is a promising approach to improve residents' diagnostic calibration, particularly given how often diagnostic changes occur.