Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
-
Vertigo is a common presenting complaint resulting from central or peripheral etiologies. Because central causes may be life-threatening, ascertaining the nature of the vertigo is crucial in the emergency department (ED). With a broad range of potential etiologies, distinguishing central causes from benign peripheral causes is a diagnostic challenge. Cranial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the recommended neuroimaging method when clinical findings are ambiguous. However, MRI scanning for every patient with an uncertain diagnosis may not be efficient or possible. Therefore, to improve ED resource utilization for patients with vertigo, there is a need to identify the subset most likely to have MRI abnormalities. It has previously been shown that S100B protein provides a useful serum marker of stroke, subarachnoid hemorrhage, and traumatic brain injury. This study evaluated whether S100B levels could predict central causes of vertigo as identified by cranial MRI in the ED. ⋯ To the best of our knowledge this is the first study assessing the utility of serum S100B levels for diagnosis of acute-onset vertigo. Serum S100B levels are associated with the presence of central causes of vertigo on cranial MRI. However, serum S100B levels are not sufficiently sensitive to exclude candidates from cranial MRI.
-
With clinical use of high-sensitivity troponin I (hsTnI), more frequent troponin elevations will occur. However, the burden and implications of these elevations are not well understood. The authors quantified the prevalence of elevated hsTnI in patients presenting with possible acute coronary syndrome (ACS) who do not have elevated troponin with a current generation assay (cardiac troponin I [cTnI]) and determined the association of these newly detected elevations with a composite of all-cause mortality and subsequent cardiac hospitalization. ⋯ On the initial sample, 9% to 11% of subjects without cTnI elevation had hsTnI elevation. Although the majority of the patients with these newly detected hsTnI elevations did not have ACS, they had a higher risk for all-cause mortality and subsequent cardiac hospitalization.
-
In the United States and around the world, effective, efficient, and reliable strategies to provide emergency care to aging adults is challenging crowded emergency departments (EDs) and a strained health care system. In response, geriatric emergency medicine (EM) clinicians, educators, and researchers collaborated with the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), American Geriatrics Society (AGS), Emergency Nurses Association (ENA), and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) to develop guidelines intended to improve ED geriatric care by enhancing expertise, educational, and quality improvement expectations; equipment; policies; and protocols. These "Geriatric Emergency Department Guidelines" represent the first formal society-led attempt to characterize the essential attribute of the geriatric ED and received formal approval from the boards of directors for each of the four societies in 2013 and 2014. This article is intended to introduce EM and geriatric health care providers to the guidelines, while providing proposals for educational dissemination, refinement via formal effectiveness evaluations and cost-effectiveness studies, and institutional credentialing.
-
Patient throughput is an increasingly important cause of emergency department (ED) crowding. The authors previously reported shorter patient length of stay (LOS) when adding a triage liaison provider, which required additional personnel. Here, the objective was to evaluate the effect of moving a fast-track provider to the triage liaison role. ⋯ The previously reported benefits on patient LOS and LWBS rates after adding a triage liaison (resource additive) were lost when that provider was moved from fast track to the triage role (resource neutral). While the triage liaison provider role may be a way to improve ED throughput when additional resources are available, as evidenced by our prior study, the triage liaison model itself does not appear to replace the staffing of treatment rooms, as evidenced by this study.
-
The objective was to assess current emergency department (ED) provider practices and preferences for tobacco cessation interventions. The ED is an opportune place to initiate smoking cessation interventions. However, little is known about ED provider current practices and preferences for cessation counseling in the ED. ⋯ Interventions most likely to be used were brief and delivered with a positive tone and included referral to external resources. The logical next step is to design and test interventions that ED providers find acceptable.