Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
-
The model for emergency department (ED) end-of-life communications after acute devastating events addresses decision-making capacity, surrogates, and advance directives, including legal definitions and application of these steps. Part II concerns communications moving from resuscitative to palliative and end-of-life treatments. After completing the steps involved in determining decision-making, emergency physicians (EPs) should consider starting palliative measures versus continuing resuscitative treatment. As communications related to these end-of-life decisions increasingly fall within the scope of emergency medicine (EM) practice, we need to become educated about and comfortable with them.
-
Comparative Study
The utility of early lactate testing in undifferentiated pediatric systemic inflammatory response syndrome.
Failure to recognize shock contributes to inadequate early resuscitation in many children with sepsis. Serum lactate levels are used to identify adult patients with septic shock, but physical examination diagnosis alone is recommended in pediatric sepsis. The authors sought to test the utility of lactate testing in pediatric emergency department (ED) patients with systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). The hypothesis was that early hyperlactatemia (serum lactate ≥ 4.0 mmol/L) would be associated with increased risk of organ dysfunction. ⋯ Among undifferentiated children with SIRS, early hyperlactatemia is significantly associated with increased risk of organ dysfunction, resuscitative therapies, and critical illness. The addition of serum lactate testing to the currently recommended clinical assessment may improve early identification of pediatric sepsis requiring resuscitation.
-
Comparative Study
Effect of a physician assistant as triage liaison provider on patient throughput in an academic emergency department.
Overcapacity issues plague emergency departments (EDs). Studies suggest that triage liaison providers (TLPs) may shorten patient length of stay (LOS) and reduce the proportion of patients who leave without being seen (LWBS), but these results are not universal. Previous studies used physicians as TLPs. We evaluated whether a physician assistant (PA), acting as a TLP, would shorten LOS and decrease LWBS rates. ⋯ The addition of a PA as a TLP was associated with a 41-minute decrease in median total LOS and a lower proportion of patients who LWBS. The decrease in total LOS is likely attributable to the addition of the TLP, with patients having shorter duration in treatment rooms on pilot days compared to control days.
-
Clinical decision rules have been developed and validated for the evaluation of patients presenting with suspected pulmonary embolism (PE) to the emergency department (ED). ⋯ In total, 9.2 and 13.8% of CT-PA procedures could have been avoided by use of PERC and Wells/D-dimer, respectively.
-
Inducing therapeutic hypothermia using chilled saline in resuscitated cardiac arrest patients has been shown to be feasible and effective. Limited research exists assessing the efficiency of this cooling method. The objective of this study was to assess the change in temperature of 4°C saline upon exiting an infusion set in the laboratory setting while varying conditions of fluid delivery. ⋯ In a laboratory setting, the most efficient method of infusing cold fluid appears to be a method that both keeps the bag of fluid insulated and infused at a faster rate.