Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
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The aim of this study was to evaluate if emergency medicine trainees with a short duration of training in echocardiography could perform and interpret bedside-focused echocardiography reliably on emergency department patients. ⋯ Emergency medicine trainees were found to be able to perform and interpret focused echocardiography reliably after a short duration of training.
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Medical errors frequently contribute to morbidity and mortality. Prehospital emergency medicine is prone to incidents that can lead to immediate deadly consequences. Critical incident reporting can identify typical problems and be the basis for structured risk management in order to reduce and mitigate these incidents. ⋯ Incident reporting in prehospital emergency medicine can identify system weaknesses. Most of the incidents were reported during care of patients in life-threatening conditions with a high impact on patient outcome. Staff-related problems contributed to the most frequent and most severe incidents.
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Improvements in triage have demonstrated improved clinical outcomes in resource-limited settings. In 2009, the Accident and Emergency (A&E) Department at the Princess Marina Hospital (PMH) in Botswana identified the need for a more objective triage system and adapted the South African Triage Scale to create the PMH A&E Triage Scale (PATS). ⋯ PATS is a more predictive triage system than pre-PATS as evidenced by improved overtriage, undertriage and patient severity predictability across triage levels.
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To examine the long term trend in assault admissions at an inner city major trauma centre and determine the association between clinical evidence of alcohol intoxication and major trauma due to assault. ⋯ There was a peak in hospital admissions due to inner city assault around 2000-2002 associated with an overall decline in hospital admissions at this trauma centre over 10 years. Clinical evidence of alcohol intoxication in patients admitted for assault appears to be associated with more severe injury, including severe head injury.
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With ever increasing concern over ambulance handover delays this paper looks at the impact of dedicated A&E nurses for ambulance handovers and the effect it can have on ambulance waiting times. It demonstrates that although such roles can bring about reduced waiting times, it also suggests that using this as a sole method to achieve these targets would require unacceptably low staff utilisation.