Tactical Medicine News Blog

The last decade has seen a torrent of literature and expert opinion on emergency airway management. It is challenging to integrate all this new information into a seamless flow when faced with a challenging airway situation. In this live podcast recorded at North York General's Emergency Medicine Update Conference 2018, Scott Weingart and Anton Helman put together the latest in emergency airway management by outlining  6 common airway pitfalls: Failure to prepare for failure, failure to position the patient properly, failure to optimize oxygenation, failure to optimize hemodynamics, failure to consider an awake intubation and failure to prepare for a cricothyrotomy... The post Ep 110 Airway Pitfalls – Live from EMU 2018 appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.

The last decade has seen a torrent of literature and expert opinion on emergency airway management. It is challenging to integrate all this new information into a seamless flow when faced with a challenging airway situation. In this live podcast recorded at North York General's Emergency Medicine Update Conference 2018, Scott Weingart and Anton Helman put together the latest in emergency airway management by outlining  6 common airway pitfalls: Failure to prepare for failure, failure to position the patient properly, failure to optimize oxygenation, failure to optimize hemodynamics, failure to consider an awake intubation and failure to prepare for a cricothyrotomy... The post Ep 110 Airway Pitfalls – Live from EMU 2018 appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.

Fractures are a common sign of abuse. It is impossible to tell from an x-ray alone whether or not a fracture is due to abuse. Fractures of the extremities are the most common skeletal injury in children who have been abused and approximately 80% of fractures due to abuse occur in children under 18 months old.1 In non-mobile children, rib fractures, long bone fractures, and metaphyseal fractures have a high correlation with child abuse. An understanding of the motor development of young children can aid physicians in the identifying fractures due to abuse.

The evaluation and management of venous thromboembolism (VTE) in the Emergency Department (ED) is fraught with questions: who should I evaluate, who should get a d-dimer, what should the d-dimer threshold be etc. Answers, unfortunately, are far less common. Due to the enormous volume of literature produced on the topic, it can be difficult for individual clinicians to incorporate all of the information into a comprehensive approach. The ACEP policy subcommittee has taken this job on for the rest of us. This clinical policy addresses five critical questions but does so over 51 pages. We’ve boiled down the major points here.

In part 1, we discussed that the ventilator can deliver 3 types of breaths: controlled, assisted or spontaneous breaths. These breaths can be delivered either by a set pressure or a set tidal volume. Then we closed with a discussion of the common ventilator modes, which is simply just combining all these types of breaths together. There are many aspects to consider in post-intubation management such as hemodynamic variations, analgesia & sedation, confirmation of the correct position of your endotracheal tube, and setting up the ventilator based on your patients physiology. Too often physicians pay little or no attention to how our amazing respiratory therapists set up the ventilator. Respiratory therapists have expertise in setting up, weaning and trouble-shooting the ventilator, but clinicians need to communicate important clinical physiologic information and their goals for their patient on mechanical ventilation. If you don’t feel comfortable setting up the ventilator at this point you at the very least need to communicate with your respiratory therapist when the ventilator is being set up.