Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
A randomized clinical trial of analgesia in children with acute abdominal pain.
To evaluate the effects of intravenous morphine on pain reduction, physical examination, and diagnostic accuracy in children with acute abdominal pain. ⋯ Intravenous morphine provides significant pain reduction to children with acute abdominal pain without adversely affecting the examination, and morphine does not affect the ability to identify children with surgical conditions.
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Comparative Study
Response time effectiveness: comparison of response time and survival in an urban emergency medical services system.
Emergency medical services (EMS) administrators seek methods to enhance system performance. One component scrutinized is the response time (RT) interval between call receipt and arrival on scene. While reducing RTs may improve survival, this remains speculative and unreported. ⋯ In this observational study, emergency calls where RTs were less than 5 minutes were associated with improved survival when compared with calls where RTs exceeded 5 minutes. While variables other than time may be associated with this improved survival, there is little evidence in these data to suggest that changing this system's response time specifications to times less than current, but greater than 5 minutes, would have any beneficial effect on survival.