The American journal of emergency medicine
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Asthma has been reported as one of the main causes of frequent attendance to the emergency department (ED), and many of those visits are potentially preventable. Understanding the characteristics of frequent attender (FA) patients with asthmatic exacerbations will help to identify factors associated with frequent attendance and improve case management. The aim of this study is to describe the characteristics of FA who present multiple times to the ED for asthma exacerbations. ⋯ We found that a small number of FAME patients accumulated a large number of ED visits and spent a significantly longer time in the ED. This group tended to be males with social, financial, and addiction problems.
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Admission on weekends and off-hours has been associated with poor outcomes and mortality from acute stroke. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether an organized clinical pathway (CP) for ischemic stroke can effectively reduce the time from arrival to evaluation and treatment in the emergency department (ED) and improve outcomes, regardless of the time from arrival in the ED. ⋯ An organized CP, based on CPOE, for ischemic stroke can effectively attenuate disparities in the time interval between ED arrival to evaluation and treatment regardless of ED arrival time. This pathway may also help to eliminate off-hour and weekend effects on outcomes from ischemic stroke.
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Observational Study
Characteristics of elderly fall patients with baseline mental status: high-risk features for intracranial injury.
Falls are a major cause of morbidity in the elderly. ⋯ Elderly fall patients who are at their baseline mental status have a low incidence of ICIs. The best predictors of ICIs are physical findings of trauma to the head and history of LOC.
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The purpose of this study is to provide resistance data for Escherichia coli isolates causing urinary tract infections in emergency department (ED) patients not requiring admission and explore if differences between this subpopulation and the hospital antibiogram exist. Differences between community-acquired urinary tract infection (CA-UTI) and health care-associated (HA-UTI) subgroups were also investigated. ⋯ E coli susceptibility for ED patients not requiring admission may not be accurately represented by hospital antibiograms that contain culture data from various patient types, sites of infection, or patients with varying illness severity. Separation of the ED population into CA-UTI and HA-UTI subgroups may be helpful when selecting empiric antibiotic therapy.
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Variation in hospital admission rates of patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) may represent an opportunity to improve practice. We seek to describe national variation in hospital admission rates from the ED and to determine the degree to which variation is not explained by patient characteristics or hospital factors. ⋯ There was variation in hospital admission rates from the ED in the United States, even after adjusting for patients' sociodemographic and clinical characteristics and accounting for hospital factors. Our findings suggest that suggesting that the likelihood of being admitted from the ED is not only dependent on clinical factors but also at which hospital the patient seeks care.