Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
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Falls represent an increasing source of geriatric morbidity and mortality. Prehospital emergency services may be uniquely suited to screen and refer subsets of high-risk older adults to fall prevention programmes. This systematic review assesses the effectiveness of such screening and referral programmes. ⋯ No high-quality evidence demonstrates that prehospital services reduce falls in community-dwelling older adults. Screening by prehospital personnel using semistructured risk assessments appears feasible, but it is unclear whether this is superior to referral based on fall-related chief complaints.
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A short-cut review was carried out to establish whether cardiac compressions are beneficial in children in traumatic cardiac arrest. Forty-eight unique papers were found using the reported searches but none were relevant to the clinical question. It is concluded that there is no evidence available to answer the question posed and that local guidelines should be followed.
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Can transcutaneous carbon dioxide pressure be a surrogate of blood gas samples for spontaneously breathing emergency patients? The ERNESTO experience.
It is known that the arterial carbon dioxide pressure (PaCO2) is useful for emergency physicians to assess the severity of dyspnoeic spontaneously breathing patients. Transcutaneous carbon dioxide pressure (PtcCO2) measurements could be a non-invasive alternative to PaCO2 measurements obtained by blood gas samples, as suggested in previous studies. This study evaluates the reliability of a new device in the emergency department (ED). ⋯ Our results show that PtcCO2 measured by the TCM4 device could not replace PaCO2 obtained by arterial blood gas analysis.