Tactical Medicine News Blog

Last month in introducing part one of our guest blog on quality assurance I told a story about a missed opportunity with follow-up care. This month I’d like to share a story with a happier ending. Recently, a patient presented at our emergency department (ED) with a non-specific fever. After discharge the patient’s blood cultures were reported positive, but attempts to reach this person over the ensuing 36 hours at the contact numbers provided were unsuccessful. An enterprising colleague googled the patient and found contact information online that eventually led to a call to the patient in a hotel room in another city, but when reached the patient was ill and confused... The post WTBS 10 – EM Quality Assurance Part 2: Individual Responsibilities appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.

Background: Syncope is a very frustrating chief complaint for many in the medical field.  There is no gold standard test and no validated decision instrument. It represents about 3 – 5% of ED visits, 1 – 6% of hospital admissions, and in patients over the age of 65 years it is the 6th most common cause of hospitalization [2][3]. Additionally, both ED and inpatient work ups are notoriously low yield for finding significant pathology. Pulmonary embolism is one of the myriad of diagnoses included in the differential diagnosis of syncope, but there is little information looking at its prevalence amongst hospitalized patients. Fast forward to Oct. 20th, 2016 and there is now some evidence just published in the NEJM: The PESIT Trial.

The Problem Residents continually face the challenge of keeping up to date with relevant medical literature in the midst of the rigors of completing medical residency. In addition, application of new medical knowledge obtained from reviewing recent research can be challenging and is a difficult skill to teach. Residency provides a unique experience for individual learners based on each learner’s personal interests, interactions with other learners and faculty, and patient encounters. Often, residents achieve their best research and article discovery when prompted by specific patient encounters. A forum for individual residents to share knowledge gained from research prompted by these encounters is needed.

This years ACEP 2016 conference took place in Las Vegas, NV from Oct 16th – 19th.  There was greater than 350 courses, labs, and workshops given throughout the week.  It was impossible to make all of these great lectures, but I was able to take away some very important clinical pearls that I wanted to share with our readers. 

Maintaining lifelong learning is challenging, especially when trying to keep up with all of the journal publications in emergency medicine (EM). In 2013, we published a compilation of 52 journal articles, which interns could read over a 52-week period, at an average pace of 1 journal article per week. In the list below, we present an updated compilation for the “52 Articles in 52 Weeks” initiative.