Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
-
Randomized Controlled Trial
Consensus conference follow-up: inter-rater reliability assessment of the Best Evidence in Emergency Medicine (BEEM) rater scale, a medical literature rating tool for emergency physicians.
Studies published in general and specialty medical journals have the potential to improve emergency medicine (EM) practice, but there can be delayed awareness of this evidence because emergency physicians (EPs) are unlikely to read most of these journals. Also, not all published studies are intended for or ready for clinical practice application. The authors developed "Best Evidence in Emergency Medicine" (BEEM) to ameliorate these problems by searching for, identifying, appraising, and translating potentially practice-changing studies for EPs. An initial step in the BEEM process is the BEEM rater scale, a novel tool for EPs to collectively evaluate the relative clinical relevance of EM-related studies found in more than 120 journals. The BEEM rater process was designed to serve as a clinical relevance filter to identify those studies with the greatest potential to affect EM practice. Therefore, only those studies identified by BEEM raters as having the highest clinical relevance are selected for the subsequent critical appraisal process and, if found methodologically sound, are promoted as the best evidence in EM. ⋯ The BEEM rater scale is a highly reliable, single-question tool for a small number of EPs to collectively rate the relative clinical relevance within the specialty of EM of recently published studies from a variety of medical journals. It compares favorably with the MORE system because it achieves a high IRR despite simply requiring raters to read each article's title and conclusion.
-
Short, subjective measures of numeracy and general health literacy in an adult emergency department.
The objective was to evaluate the reliability and validity of brief subjective measures of numeracy and general health literacy in the adult emergency department (ED) setting. ⋯ The SNS and SLS are reliable, valid tests that can be used to rapidly estimate general health literacy and numeracy skill levels in adult ED patients. Continuing work is needed to establish their ability to predict clinical outcomes.
-
Randomized Controlled Trial
The association between emergency medical services field performance assessed by high-fidelity simulation and the cognitive knowledge of practicing paramedics.
The objective of this study was to assess the association between the performance of practicing paramedics on a validated cognitive exam and their field performance, assessed on a simulated emergency medical services (EMS) response. ⋯ This study simultaneously assessed cognitive knowledge and simulated field performance. Utilization of these measurement techniques allowed for the assessment and comparison of field performance and cognitive knowledge. Results demonstrated an association between a practicing paramedic's performance on a cognitive examination and field performance, assessed by a simulated EMS response.