Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
-
Ambulance crews usually have just one opportunity to convey information about their patients to emergency department (ED) personnel. ED staff receiving patients from ambulance crews will naturally be focussed on their own initial assessment of the patient, which often distracts them from listening carefully to the ambulance crew's handover. Important information may be lost after the ambulance crew leaves. ⋯ Communications training, clinical team leadership and team discipline must support the communication process between ambulance crews and the ED team to ensure that important pre-hospital information is not lost or misinterpreted. Electronic patient report forms are currently under development and may provide a partial solution for the transfer of accurate pre-hospital information to ED staff.
-
To determine if emergency physicians (EPs) are ready to accept 360 degrees feedback, and agreement between self and colleagues' assessment in a 360 degrees feedback for EPs. ⋯ EPs would accept 360 degrees feedback provided that they selected their appraisers and results were confidential. Colleagues reported that EPs were weak in "soft" and system skills.
-
Changes in the regulation of junior doctors' hours and in the design of medical career pathways have rendered the traditional weekly tutorial ineffective for teaching the core knowledge of emergency medicine. In this paper, the inception of a virtual leaning environment and the development of an online course for F2 doctors in our emergency department are described. The course, delivered in the open source Moodle virtual learning environment, allows us to reliably deliver educational content to all our juniors regardless of shift patterns. It provides insight into the effectiveness of that education, and records the students' activities and achievements to a level far beyond that achievable through traditional teaching methods.
-
Comparative Study
Short stay emergency admissions to a West Midlands NHS Trust: a longitudinal descriptive study, 2002 2005.
To describe changes and characteristics in emergency admissions to a West Midlands National Health Service Trust, 2002-2005, with a focus on short stay emergency admissions. ⋯ Increases in emergency admissions were greater in short stay than long stay cases. Reasons for this may be both appropriate (increased use of clinical protocols and falling average length of stay) and detrimental (pressure to meet 4 h emergency department target, changing primary care provision). Further research is needed before generalising findings to other Trusts.