Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Multicenter Study
The Six-Item Screener to detect cognitive impairment in older emergency department patients.
Cognitive impairment due to delirium or dementia is common in older emergency department (ED) patients. To prevent errors, emergency physicians (EPs) should use brief, sensitive tests to evaluate older patient's mental status. Prior studies have shown that the Six-Item Screener (SIS) meets these criteria. ⋯ The sensitivity of the SIS was lower than in prior studies. The reasons for this lower sensitivity are unclear. Further study is needed to clarify the ideal brief mental status test for ED use.
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The Tuscan Emergency Medicine Initiative (TEMI) is a comprehensive emergency medicine (EM) training program designed to build an EM training infrastructure in Tuscany, Italy. The program has successfully trained a team of instructors using a train-the-trainers model, certified 350 physicians who are already practicing in emergency departments (EDs), and established a master's program as a bridge to specialty training at the region's three universities. Using lessons learned from this program, the authors identify eight factors (The Eight Cs) that can serve as a guide to implementing a collaborative EM program in other environments: collaboration, context, culture, credibility, consulting, consistency, critique, and conclusion. Each of these topics is described in detail and may be useful to other international interventions.
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Oral presentations are a critical element in the communication of medical knowledge between students and faculty, but in most locations, the amount of time spent on teaching the oral presentation is minimal. Furthermore, the standard oral presentation does not work well within the emergency medicine (EM) setting, due to time constraints and the different principles that make EM a unique specialty. This article provides a suggested approach on how to educate students on optimal oral presentations in EM, as well as providing a link to an online guide instructing medical students how to give oral presentations.
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Multicenter Study
Children with bacterial meningitis presenting to the emergency department during the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine era.
The epidemiology of bacterial meningitis in children in the era of widespread heptavalent conjugate pneumococcal vaccination (PCV7) is unknown. ⋯ Although now a rare infectious disease in United States, bacterial meningitis still causes substantial morbidity in affected children. Despite the introduction of PCV7, S. pneumoniae remains the most common cause of bacterial meningitis in U.S. children, with approximately half of cases due to nonvaccine serotypes.
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Academic emergency medicine can benefit by broadening the way in which scholarship is defined to include teaching, integration of knowledge, application of knowledge to practical clinical problems and as discovery of new knowledge. A broad view of scholarship will help foster innovation and may lead to new areas of expertise. The creation of a scholarly environment in emergency medicine faces the continued challenge of an increasing clinical demand. The solution to this dilemma will likely require a mix of clinical staff physicians and academic faculty who are appreciated, nurtured and rewarded in different ways, for the unique contributions they make to the overall success of the academic program.