Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Multicenter Study
Patient satisfaction data as a quality indicator: a tale of two emergency departments.
Patient satisfaction is a commonly measured indicator of quality emergency care. However, the existing empirical literature on emergency department (ED) patient satisfaction provides little guidance on how to analyze, interpret, and use data obtained in the clinical setting. Using two EDs as examples, the authors describe practical strategies designed to identify priority areas for potential improvement. ⋯ A combination of applying explicit acceptability criteria to descriptive statistics and using correlation coefficients with overall satisfaction can help to maximize the usefulness of patient satisfaction data by uncovering priority areas. These priority areas were broken down into maintenance and remediation indicators and were found to vary considerably depending on the hospital in question. Such strategies can help to refine performance improvement efforts by targeting those domains with the greatest impact on overall satisfaction.
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Comparative Study
Geriatric trauma patients-are they receiving trauma center care?
The primary purpose of this study was to evaluate whether severely injured geriatric patients were as likely to be treated at designated trauma centers (TCs) within the statewide trauma system. The secondary objective was to compare the demographic and injury characteristics of severely injured older and young patients who received care in TCs with the characteristics of those patients cared for in non-TCs. ⋯ Seriously injured older patients were less likely to receive care in a trauma center than younger patients.
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Emergency physicians commonly perform death notifications. Physician training in death notification has been limited. Resident physicians are rarely evaluated in their performance of death notifications. ⋯ Death notification is a skill that can be evaluated like other EM skills. Trained EM residents performed well in actual death notifications when directly observed and evaluated. Senior residents and female residents were more likely to be rated excellent.
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Comparative Study
Amiodarone and bretylium in the treatment of hypothermic ventricular fibrillation in a canine model.
Refractory ventricular fibrillation (VF) is a complication of severe hypothermia. Despite mixed experimental data, some authors view bretylium as the drug of choice in hypothermic VF. Bretylium was removed from Advanced Cardiac Life Support guidelines, and, to date, efficacy of amiodarone in hypothermia is unknown. ⋯ In this model of severe hypothermic VF, neither amiodarone nor bretylium was significantly better than placebo in improving the resuscitation rate.