Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Comparative Study
Patient concerns about medical errors in emergency departments.
Despite large numbers of emergency encounters, little is known about how emergency department (ED) patients conceptualize their risk of medical errors. This study examines how safe ED patients feel from medical errors, which errors are of greatest concern, how concerns differ by patient and hospital characteristics, and the relationship between concerns and willingness to return for future care. ⋯ The majority of ED patients felt relatively safe from medical errors, yet a significant percentage of patients experienced concern about a specific error during their emergency encounter. Concerns varied by both patient and hospital characteristics and were highly linked to patient satisfaction. The selective nature of concerns may suggest that patients are attuned to cues they perceive to be linked to specific medical errors, but efforts to involve patients in error detection/prevention programs will be challenging given the stressful and intimidating nature of ED encounters.
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Comparative Study
Survey of emergency medicine resident debt status and financial planning preparedness.
Most resident physicians accrue significant financial debt throughout their medical and graduate medical education. The objective of this study was to analyze emergency medicine resident debt status, financial planning actions, and educational experiences for financial planning and debt management. ⋯ Most emergency medicine residency programs do not provide their residents with financial planning education. Most residents have accrued significant debt and believe that more financial planning and debt management education is needed during residency.
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To determine which components of a residency Web site (RWS) are important to residency applicants. ⋯ The content, and not necessarily the aesthetic quality, of an RWS is important to residency applicants. The residency program Web site would seem to be an important factor in the applicant's decision to apply. The applicant's perspective provides training program directors and administrators with focused direction in Web site development or for upgrading existing RWSs for use by future applicants.
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Editorial Comparative Study
Level 1 cardiac arrest centers: learning from the trauma surgeons.
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Comparative Study
The validity of chief complaint and discharge diagnosis in emergency department-based syndromic surveillance.
Emergency department (ED)-based syndromic surveillance systems are being used by public health departments to monitor for outbreaks of infectious diseases, including bioterrorism; however, few systems have been validated. The authors evaluated a "drop-in" syndromic surveillance system by comparing syndrome categorization in the ED with chief complaints and ED discharge diagnoses from medical record review. ⋯ In general, this syndromic surveillance system classified patients into appropriate syndrome categories with fair to good agreement compared with chief complaints and discharge diagnoses. The present findings suggest that use of ED discharge diagnoses, in addition to or instead of chief complaints, may increase surveillance validity for both automated and drop-in syndromic surveillance systems.