Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
-
Emergency medicine (EM) residency programs spend significant time and money offering an interview day experience for their applicants. The day may include a range of activities, although which are most important from the applicants' point of view are not known. ⋯ Residency programs have the opportunity to control two of the three most important ways in which applicants use the interview day to assess programs by offering off-campus gatherings with residents and ensuring that every candidate interviews with the program director. Residency programs may use this knowledge to optimize interview day resources.
-
For more than a decade, emergency medicine (EM) organizations have produced guidelines, training, and leadership for disaster management. However, to date there have been limited guidelines for emergency physicians (EPs) needing to provide a rapid response to a surge in demand. The aim of this project was to identify strategies that may guide surge management in the emergency department (ED). ⋯ The group then characterized surge strategies from their corpus of experience; examined them through available relevant published literature; and collated these within domains of space, staff, supplies, and system operations. These recommendations detail 22 potential actions available to an EP working in the context of surge, along with detailed guidance on surge recognition, triage, patient flow through the ED, and clinical goals and practices. The article also identifies areas that merit future research, including the measurement of surge capacity, constraints to strategy implementation, validation of surge strategies, and measurement of strategy impacts on throughput, cost, and quality of care.
-
Editorial Comment
If you've seen one EMS system, you've seen one EMS system...
-
Randomized Controlled Trial
Use of an automated device for external chest compressions by first-aid workers unfamiliar with the device: a step toward public access?
The objective was to establish the feasibility of using an automated external chest compression (ECC) device among first-aid workers unfamiliar with the device. ⋯ An automated ECC device can be rapidly placed and used by first-aid workers unfamiliar with the device. In the light of these results, use of the device by the general public can be envisaged.
-
The goal of undergraduate medical education is to prepare medical students for residency training. Active learning approaches remain important elements of the curriculum. Active learning of technical procedures in medical schools is particularly important, because residency training time is increasingly at a premium because of changes in the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education duty hour rules. Better preparation in medical school could result in higher levels of confidence in conducting procedures earlier in graduate medical education training. The hypothesis of this study was that more procedural training opportunities in medical school are associated with higher first-year resident self-reported competency with common medical procedures at the beginning of residency training. ⋯ Recent medical school graduates report lack of self-confidence in their ability to perform common procedures upon entering residency training. Implementation of a medical school procedure course to increase exposure to procedures may address this challenge.