Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Multicenter Study
Prospective Validation of a Checklist to Predict Short-term Death in Older Patients After Emergency Department Admission in Australia and Ireland.
Emergency departments (EDs) are pressured environment where patients with supportive and palliative care needs may not be identified. We aimed to test the predictive ability of the CriSTAL (Criteria for Screening and Triaging to Appropriate aLternative care) checklist to flag patients at risk of death within 3 months who may benefit from timely end-of-life discussions. ⋯ The modified CriSTAL tool (with CFS instead of Fried's frailty instrument) had good discriminant power to improve certainty of short-term mortality prediction in both health systems. The predictive ability of models is anticipated to help clinicians gain confidence in initiating earlier end-of-life discussions. The practicalities of embedding screening for risk of death in routine practice warrant further investigation.
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Multicenter Study
What is the specificity of the aortic dissection detection risk score in a low prevalence population?
Acute aortic syndrome (AAS) is a time-sensitive and difficult-to-diagnose aortic emergency. The American Heart Association (AHA) proposed the acute aortic dissection detection risk score (ADD-RS) as a means to reduce miss rate and improve time to diagnosis. Previous validation studies were performed in a high prevalence population of patients. We do not know how the rule will perform in a lower-prevalence population. This is important because application of a rule with low specificity would increase imaging rates and complications. Our goal was to assess if the diagnostic accuracy of the score would be maintained in a low-prevalence population that we are attempting to risk stratify in the emergency department (ED). ⋯ Our study confirms that in North America the prevalence of AAS in those undergoing advanced imaging is low. The ADD-RS in this population has a low specificity. A lack of defined inclusion criteria and a low specificity limits the application of this rule in practice.
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Multicenter Study
Critical Review, Development and Testing of a Taxonomy for Adverse Events and Near Misses in the Emergency Department.
An adverse event (AE) is a physical harm experienced by a patient due to health care, requiring intervention. Describing and categorizing AEs is important for quality and safety assessment and identifying areas for improvement. Safety science suggests that improvement efforts should focus on preventing and mitigating harm rather than on error, which is commonplace but infrequently leads to AEs. Most taxonomies fail to describe harm experienced by patients (e.g., hypoxia, hemorrhage, anaphylaxis), focusing instead on errors, and use categorizations that are too broad to be useful (e.g., "communication error"). We set out to create a patient-centered, emergency department (ED)-specific framework for describing AEs and near misses to advance quality and safety in the acute care setting. ⋯ We developed a taxonomy of AEs and near misses for the ED, modified from an existing framework. Testing of the tool with minimal training yielded high performance and good inter-rater reliability. This taxonomy can be adapted and modified by EDs seeking to enhance their quality and safety reviews and characterize harm occurring in their EDs for quality improvement purposes.
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Multicenter Study
Capturing Emergency Department Discharge Quality with the Care Transitions Measure: A Pilot Study.
Recent attention has been given to developing measures to capture the quality of ED transitions of care. We examined the utility of a patient-reported measure of transitional care, the Care Transitions Measure-3 (CTM-3), in the ED setting and its association with outcomes of care after ED discharge. ⋯ The CTM-3 is associated with outcomes of care after an ED visit, including ED return visits and medication adherence, and may have utility as a patient-reported measure of ED transitions of care.