Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Multicenter Study
Trends and Characterization of Academic Emergency Department Patient Visits: A Five-year Review.
To meet the unique comparative data needs of academic emergency departments (EDs), we describe the recent 5-year national and regional trends for adult emergency patients' characteristics and operational parameters at academic emergency medical centers. ⋯ With a focus on larger academic institutions, differences were noted in the overall increases in volume and acuity. In this survey, participating institutions experienced increased volumes of patients with seemingly higher illness severity. While inroads have been made in LWBS rates, there has not been an overall decrease in total walkouts. The data reported here differed in many aspects compared to other benchmark surveys.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter Study
Randomized Clinical Trial of Intravenous Acetaminophen as an Analgesic Adjunct for Older Adults With Acute Severe Pain.
Older adults are at risk for undertreatment of pain. We examined intravenous (IV) acetaminophen as an analgesic adjunct to IV opioids in the care of older emergency department (ED) patients with acute severe pain. ⋯ In this randomized clinical trial, the addition of IV acetaminophen to IV hydromorphone as an adjunctive analgesic for acute, severe, pain in older adults provided neither clinically nor statistically superior pain relief when compared to hydromorphone alone within the first hour of treatment.
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Emergency departments (ED) are the first line of evaluation for patients at risk and in crisis, with or without overt suicidality (ideation, attempts). Currently employed triage and assessments methods miss some of the individuals who subsequently become suicidal. The Convergent Functional Information for Suicidality (CFI-S) 22-item checklist of risk factors, which does not ask directly about suicidal ideation, has demonstrated good predictive ability for suicidality in previous studies in psychiatrict patients but has not been tested in the real-world setting of EDs. ⋯ Using CFI-S, or some of its items, in busy EDs may help improve the detection of patients at high risk for future suicidality.