The Journal of surgical research
-
Observational Study
Home Disposal Kits for Leftover Opioid Medications After Surgery: Do They Work?
Postoperative overprescribing is common, and many patients will have excess medications. An effective method to encourage disposal is lacking. We hypothesized that a convenient home disposal kit will result in more appropriate disposal of excess opioids. ⋯ The provision of a convenient home disposal kit postoperatively increased patient-reported opioid disposal.
-
Multicenter Study
Optimizing Opioid-Prescribing Practices After Parathyroidectomy.
To help control opioid overprescription, we conducted a large institutional, 3-site initiative to provide discharge prescribing guidelines for different procedures. Our aim is to refine institutional guidelines for parathyroidectomy. ⋯ Over half of patients undergoing parathyroidectomy did not consume any opioid, and very few needed more than 2 d of opioid. Moreover, most patients did not dispose the unused opioids, which put these pills at risk of diversion and misuse. Surgical approach did not change consumption, illustrating that these guidelines are applicable to thyroidectomy given the similarity between techniques. We recommend prescribing nonopioid analgesics for patients undergoing parathyroidectomy.
-
To understand how surgeon expectation of case difficulty relates to workload for colon and rectal procedures and to identify possible surgeon-perceived drivers contributing to case difficulty. ⋯ Procedural difficulty significantly differed across procedure type. More than one-third of cases were more difficult than expected, during which surgeons attributed this to operative team characteristics as well as issues in patient anatomy and body habitus.
-
Multicenter Study
Performance of Two Head Injury Decision Rules Evaluated on an External Cohort of 18,913 Children.
The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) decision rule demonstrates high sensitivity for identifying children at low risk for clinically important traumatic brain injury (ciTBI). As with the PECARN rule, the Israeli Decision Algorithm for Identifying TBI in Children (IDITBIC) recommends proceeding directly to computed tomography (CT) in children with Glasgow Coma Score (GCS) <15. The aim was to assess the diagnostic accuracy of two clinical rules that assign children with GCS <15 at presentation directly to CT. ⋯ The two decision rules demonstrated high accuracy in identifying ciTBI. As a screening tool, the PECARN rule outperformed IDITBIC. The findings suggest that clinicians should strongly consider directing children with GCS <15 at presentation to CT scan.
-
Delayed emergency department (ED) LOS has been associated with increased mortality and increased hospital length of stay (LOS) for various patient populations. Trauma patients often require significant effort in evaluation, workup, and disposition; however, patient and hospital characteristics associated with increased LOS in the ED for trauma patients remain unclear. ⋯ ED LOS varied significantly by patient and hospital characteristics. Medicaid patients and those patients at university hospitals were associated with significantly higher ED LOS, whereas ACS trauma verification level status had strong correlation with ED LOS. These results may allow targeted quality improvement programs to enhance ED LOS.