Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
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A short-cut review was carried out to determine whether protein S100B either alone or incorporated into clinical guidelines could be used to identify accurately those adults with mild head injury who had significant brain trauma. Thirty-five papers were found using the reported searches, of which nine presented the best evidence to answer the clinical question. The author, date and country of publication, patient group studied, study type, relevant outcomes, results and study weaknesses of those best papers are shown in table 3. It is concluded that while S100B is a sensitive test for traumatic brain injury, there is no evidence to determine whether it adds value to any current clinical guidelines.
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Evaluating the quality of life of young adult survivors of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is important as they are likely to have a longer life expectancy than older patients. The aim of this study was to assess their functional and quality of life outcomes. ⋯ The majority of survivors have good functional and quality of life outcomes. Telephone follow-up is feasible in the young adult survivors of cardiac arrest; loss to follow-up is common.
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The last decade has seen a vast amount of work directed at the investigation of patient harm events. Unfortunately, little of it has pertained to prehospital care and as such, risk remains unquantified and poorly understood in this setting. We hypothesised that adverse patient events occurring during the prehospital phase may fall into discernible patterns, and that an understanding of these patterns would be valuable in the development of mitigation strategies. ⋯ The deteriorating patient was identified as the leading single contributor to prehospital adverse events, and two perfect storm patient harm scenarios were found to contribute materially to adverse outcomes. This approach to identifying both single factors contributing to an incident and factors which could be grouped together in a pattern, appears useful in delineating risk in the acute prehospital setting, and warrants further exploration in this and other areas of patient safety.
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Novel drugs of abuse are becoming more common in the UK, and they represent particular difficulties in management. We present a case series of toxicity due to a novel substance Eric-3. ⋯ In this outbreak, Eric-3 gave symptoms similar to other stimulants. It may have been a novel substance 3-/4-flouroephedrine. It underlines the need for prospective data collection and information sharing.