Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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To evaluate probabilistic matching for linking a cohort of cardiac arrest (CA) patients identified in the Metro Toronto Ambulance (MTA) database in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to their appropriate record in either the Vital Statistics Information System (VSIS) or the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI) databases and thus establish their clinical outcomes. ⋯ Probabilistic matching is an effective method by which researchers can use existing administrative data to determine outcomes of population cohorts. This is especially valuable in situations where controlled intervention studies are not feasible or may be inappropriate. In this analysis, in-hospital management of admitted CA patients, as determined by hospital-specific survival rates and length of stay, suggests no measurable differences in the care provided to these patients by hospitals in Toronto.
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Faculty development is an important, multifaceted topic in academic medicine. In this article, academic emergency physicians discuss aspects of faculty development, including: 1) a department chair's method for developing individual faculty members, 2) the traditional university approach to promotion and tenure, 3) faculty development in a new department, and 4) personal development.
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Clinical Trial Controlled Clinical Trial
Rotating shiftwork schedules: can we enhance physician adaptation to night shifts?
To evaluate the effectiveness of a broad, literature-based night shiftwork intervention for enhancement of emergency physicians' (EPs') adaptation to night rotations. ⋯ Although the experimental intervention was successfully implemented, it failed to significantly improve attending physicians' sleep, performance, or mood on night shifts. A decrease in speed of intubation, vigilance reaction times, and subjective alertness was evident each time the physicians rotated through the night shift. These findings plus the limited sleep across all conditions and shifts suggest that circadian-mediated disruptions of waking neurobehavioral functions and sleep deprivation are problems in EPs.