International journal of emergency medicine
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Emergency departments (EDs) are a critical, yet heterogeneous, part of international emergency care. The National ED Inventories (NEDI) survey has been used in multiple countries as a standardized method to benchmark ED characteristics. We sought to describe the characteristics, resources, capabilities, and capacity of EDs in the densely populated capital city of Bogotá, Colombia. ⋯ Bogotá EDs have high annual visit volumes and long length-of-stay, and half are over capacity. To meet the emergency care needs of people in Bogotá and other large cities, Colombia should consider improving urban ED capacity and training more emergency medicine specialists capable of efficiently staffing its large and crowded EDs.
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The Canadian Emergency Department Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) is an integral part of the Canadian emergency medicine triaging system. There is growing interest and implementation of CTAS worldwide. However, little is known about its reliability outside Canada. The aim of this study was to determine the reliability agreement of CTAS in a tertiary care emergency center in Saudi Arabia. ⋯ CTAS has good reliability among emergency department (ED) triage nurses in King Abdulaziz Medical City (KAMC), Saudi Arabia. The findings suggest that CTAS might be a reliable instrument when applied in countries outside Canada.
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To influence self-referral, it is crucial to know a patient's motives to directly visit the emergency department (ED). The goal of this study is to examine motives for self-referral to the ED and compare these motives in relation to appropriateness. ⋯ The choice of patients to self-refer to an ED is often an explicate decision. Patients are looking for specialist help and want fast and easy access to radiologic and laboratory investigations. Even though the primary care network is well developed in the Netherlands, the reasons for self-referral are similar to the reasons found in previous literature based in other countries. Patients who visit the ED because of health concerns visit the ED more often appropriately than patients visiting for practical reasons.
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This study investigates clinicians' views of clinician-patient and clinician-clinician communication, including key factors that prevent clinicians from achieving successful communication in a large, high-pressured trilingual Emergency Department (ED) in Hong Kong. ⋯ These communication problems (experiential, interpersonal and contextual) are intertwined, creating a complex yet weak communication structure that compromises patient safety, as well as patient and clinician satisfaction. The researchers argue that hospitals should develop and implement best-practice policies and educational programmes for clinicians that focus on the following: (1) understanding the primary causes of communication problems in EDs, (2) accepting the tenets and practices of patient-centred care, (3) establishing clear and consistent knowledge transfer procedures and (4) lowering the patient-to-clinician ratio in order to create the conditions that foster successful communication. The research provides a model for future research on the relationship between communication and the quality and safety of the patient safety.
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This study demonstrated a method to train medical students at Hanoi Medical School in airway management from Omaha, Nebraska, using tele-mentoring techniques. Correct placement of the endotracheal tube was documented by tele-broncoscopy following intubation. This technology may increase medical training capabilities in remote or developing areas of the world. Medical care delivery could be performed using this technology by tele-mentoring a lesser trained medical provider at a distant site enabling them to accomplish complex medical tasks.