Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Pain studies require prospective patient enrollment to ensure accurate pain assessment. The authors correlated pain assessments of an acute painful episode over a one-week period and determined the accuracy of patient pain severity recall over time. ⋯ Pain severity assessments of acute painful events one and seven days later were similar and highly correlated with initial assessments using both verbal numeric scales. Patients accurately recall the severity of an acute painful episode for at least one week after its occurrence, which may allow retrospective pain assessments.
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To describe a novel endotracheal intubation technique, magnetically guided intubation (MGI), and its rate of success in inexperienced medical students and interns using an airway mannequin model. ⋯ A novel method of orotracheal intubation using magnetic guidance is described as achieving a high rate of successful intubations when performed by inexperienced intubators.
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After a pilot study suggested that African American patients enrolled in managed care organizations (MCOs) were more likely than whites to be denied authorization for emergency department (ED) care through gatekeeping, the authors sought to determine the association between ethnicity and denial of authorization in a second, larger study at another hospital. ⋯ African Americans were more likely than whites to be denied authorization for ED visits. The observational study design raises the possibility that incomplete control of confounding contributed to or accounted for the association between ethnicity and gatekeeping decisions. Nevertheless, the questions that these findings raise about equity of gatekeeping indicate a need for additional research in this area.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
LET versus EMLA for pretreating lacerations: a randomized trial.
To compare the anesthetic efficacy of EMLA cream (eutectic mixture of local anesthetics) with that of LET solution (lidocaine, epinephrine, tetracaine) for pretreating lacerations prior to lidocaine injection. ⋯ Pretreatment of simple lacerations with LET or EMLA at the time of patient presentation results in similar amounts of pain of subsequent local infiltration of lidocaine
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To determine whether emergency medicine (EM)-bound and non-EM-bound senior medical students on the EM subinternship have a uniform experience with respect to number and acuity of patients seen and procedures performed. ⋯ In an EM subinternship, experience was variable between EM-bound and non-EM-bound students. Male students saw lower-acuity patients. The EM-bound students saw more patients, higher-acuity patients, and performed more procedures than non-EM-bound cohorts. Emergency medicine educators responsible for medical education should be aware of these differences.