Articles: hospital-emergency-service.
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Pediatric emergency care · Nov 2024
Perspectives of Caregivers on Children Boarding With Mental Health Conditions.
Addressing the acute mental healthcare needs of children is a national crisis. Despite the ongoing crisis, there are limited prior studies that capture caregiver perspectives on acute pediatric mental healthcare, notably in a general emergency department (ED) in a rural state. Based on these knowledge gaps, our objective was to assess caregiver opinions and perspectives of acute management for children boarding with mental health conditions. ⋯ Caregivers face considerable challenges in attaining timely and appropriate acute mental health care for their children. Immediate and innovative resource allocation is needed across the healthcare continuum to bolster the acute mental healthcare services currently offered to children and families, especially in the general ED setting.
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Despite widespread efforts to reduce emergency department (ED) visits, patients newly diagnosed with cancer often use the ED for commonly anticipated acute care needs. Existing delivery innovations to reduce ED use are underused, and reasons for this are not understood. Patients who recently visited the ED may provide insights into these patterns of care. ⋯ Even robust education programs for patients with cancer may have difficulty conveying the availability of innovative clinical services. Patient perspectives on avoidable ED visits may differ from policy makers' definitions.
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Individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) constitute a significant portion of patients who present to the emergency department with dyspnea. However, there is no ideal method for predicting mortality or making hospitalization decisions in the emergency department (ED). In this regard, objective findings are needed for these patients. Since there are no objective findings regarding the hospitalization decision, there may be an increase in the re-admission rate of patients who needed hospitalization but were decided to be discharged. Side-stream end-tidal carbon dioxide (EtCO2) measurements offer a non-invasive, easy-to-interpret, quickly accessible, and reproducible method that can be applied at the bedside. ⋯ It was observed that both the pretreatment alpha angle values and the posttreatment alpha angle variables were statistically significant in predicting the readmission of the patients within 30 days (p = 0.001, p = 0.003) CONCLUSION: The results of this study show that alpha angle values measured for patients with COPD who present to the ED with the complaint of dyspnea may be used to predict readmission.
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In the United States (US), the quality of care provided to children during emergencies is highly variable. Following implementation of the National Pediatric Readiness Project (NPRP), inclusive of two national online assessments of Emergency Departments (EDs), national organizations involved in Emergency Medical Services (EMS) systems convened to launch the Prehospital Pediatric Readiness Project (PPRP). The PPRP seeks to ensure high-quality pediatric prehospital emergency care for all children. One of the first priorities of PPRP is to assess the current level of pediatric readiness in EMS systems. The development of the first comprehensive national assessment of pediatric readiness in EMS systems is described. ⋯ The inaugural PPRP Assessment was open access May through July 2024, and the results will be used to guide future PPRP efforts.
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Back pain is a prevalent condition that affects 1 in 6 Australians at any time, with high associated health care costs. To date, there is limited information relating to symptom severity and recovery trajectory in people with back pain who present to the emergency department for care. A digital care pathway (DCP) can track patient outcomes following presentation with back pain. The primary aim of this protocol is to outline the co-development, implementation, and evaluation of a DCP for back pain patients who present to the emergency department. ⋯ This project has been approved via the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia's National Mutual Acceptance Scheme by St Vincent's Hospital Human Ethics Committee (2022/PID06476), La Trobe University Research Governance (HEC#206/22), and Northern Health Research Governance (NH-2023-372687). We plan to publish the findings in a peer-reviewed journal and present them at conferences.