Once again it’s starting to look like influenza season. Just when you thought your ED was busy enough, here comes Influenza A. Early reports suggest it may be a predominant H3N2 year – similar to the nasty flu that hit Australia with lots of admissions and subsequent deaths. So, here is our 2017/18 Fever &
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Health Quality Ontario has just provided an evaluation of the first year of the ‘Emergency Department RETURN VISIT QUALITY PROGRAM’. 86 ED’s in Ontario participated in this program. 571 of 2,365 (24.1%) audited all-cause 72-hour return visits had quality issues/adverse events identified. 107 of 219 (48.9%) audited sentinel diagnoses (missed MI, Subarachnoid haemorrhage and paediatric
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Stiell et al. recently published: Prospective and Explicit Clinical Validation of the Ottawa Heart Failure Risk Scale, With and Without Use of Quantitative NT-proBNP. AEM March 2017. Congratulations on this publication. A discussion with the lead author is available at http://thesgem.com/2017/03/sgem170-dont-go-breaking-my-heart-ottawa-heart-failure-risk-scale/ and on updated https://emergencymedicinecases.com/episode-56-stiell-sessions-clinical-decision-rules-risk-scales/ BEC started making this scale available to ED MD’s at the point
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In Ontario the CPSO Peer Assessment in Emergency Medicine is being redesigned. Their goal is to make good physicians great. Their premise is that good documentation is part of good care. They plan to look for different data elements or ‘elements of quality’ on the chart covering important items from the history, examination, investigations
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TREKK authors have recently reported that “The majority of children requiring emergency care are treated in general emergency departments (EDs) with variable levels of pediatric care expertise.” CJEM. 2017 Jan 9:1-11. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Scott%20SD%20et%20al%20CJEM%202017 TREKK has also noted that “Acute exacerbations of asthma are one of the most common reasons for children to seek emergency care and require urgent
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BEC’s evidence-based charts for patients who present to your emergency department with a fever from Ebola-affected countries are now available for download at emergencymedicinecases.com/emergency-ebola-preparedness/. These templates are a tool for history-taking, examination, and documentation for patients who may have been exposed to Ebola. The charts are included as part of the supplemental materials to an
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Sudbury Hospital’s Emergency Doctors Have Public Health Guidelines Directly on Patient Charts Sudbury, Ontario: Emergency department doctors at Health Sciences North have an extra tool as they screen patients for possible exposure to the Ebola virus. When patients who have travelled internationally arrive at the Sudbury hospital with a fever, doctors use a specialized medical
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We know that adding clinical decision support at the point of care improves knowledge translation and increases the use of good medical evidence. What’s hard is measuring how much of an improvement there is. During rounds yesterday, an emergency physician did a quick chart audit to check positive rates from CTPAs for suspected pulmonary embolism. What
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This 2.5 minute video shows how easy it is to build clinical decision support into your paper-based emergency department workflow.
