Search Tag: emergency department
2024 06 Feb
Hospitals utilise unscheduled return visit (URV) rates in emergency departments (EDs) to determine care quality. Higher rates lead to increased costs and longer wait times for patients who need immediate care. Frequent ED visits also contribute to overcrowding, causing treatment delays and higher mortality rates. Developing predictive models...Read more
2022 15 Feb
Approximately 85,000 patients are admitted to the emergency department in the U.S. each year for sepsis or septic shock. The Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC) has established International clinical practice guidelines for managing these patients. The guidelines consist of a bundle that includes treatments for various components of sepsis, including rapid...Read more
2020 12 Feb
Violent attacks against emergency physicians remain a problem. While mass shootings at hospitals are quite rare, violent attacks against emergency physicians are becoming too common these days. There have been cases where emergency physicians have been knocked unconscious, physically assaulted, hit, bitten, kicked, and punched by patients. According...Read more
2019 28 Dec
As we move into 2020, here's a quick recap of our most clicked stories in ICU in 2019: Using Biomarkers for Mortality Prediction in Patients With Sepsis A new study evaluated the prognostic value of six biomarkers at onset of sepsis in adult patients with sepsis or septic shock. Risk Factors for Frailty and Death in the ICU...Read more
2019 07 Nov
Most emergency rooms have a triage system that enables the triage nurse to determine which patient is seriously ill to ensure that the patient is promptly admitted and treated. For disorders like heart attack and stroke, there are standard emergency room protocols in most hospitals that enable patients to receive care within 3-5 hours of initial...Read more
2019 20 Sep
Intensive care units (ICUs) have a considerable impact on the lives of the patients that are admitted there to their families and the society as a whole. The delivery of intensive care to these patients is considerably expensive and resource-intensive. With an ageing population and the rise in the volume and acuity of patients requiring critical care,...Read more
2019 22 Aug
Delays in transferring patients from the Emergency Department (ED) to the ICU could delay treatment, leaving the patient at risk. A recent study explored the impact of this and found that increased ED to ICU wait times were associated with increased hospital mortality. Data was used from the Dutch quality registry National Intensive Care Evaluation,...Read more
2019 02 Aug
A study of the Massey Family Foundation Emergency Critical Care Center – EC3 found that the implementation of emergency department ICUs led to improved survival rates and better patient care. Opened in February 2015, EC3 is a highly advanced critical care centre, next to the emergency department at Michigan Medical. The unit is equipped with five...Read more
2019 25 Jul
Existing biomarkers provide limited use for rapid detection of sepsis since they cannot accurately distinguish sepsis from other common conditions encountered in the emergency department (ED). Now a U.S. clinical trial suggests that the monocyte distribution width (MDW) can be a useful indicator of Sepsis-2 and Sepsis-3 in high-risk ED patients. "Changes...Read more
2019 19 Jul
Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) has become an established tool for the rapid assessment and diagnosis of patients across a variety of medical disciplines, not least in the high-octane environment of intensive care medicine. Dr. Timm Steuber, senior consultant and head of the ICU at Evangelisches Krankenhaus Unna, Germany, discusses his day-to-day...Read more
2019 22 Mar
At the 39th International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine , Dr. Michael Pulia discussed the challenges of antibiotic stewardship. Dr. Pulia, Assistant Professor at the BerbeeWalsh Department of Emergency Medicine, serves as Medical Director for the ED antibiotic stewardship quality improvement programme at the University of Wisconsin. ...Read more
2019 27 Feb
The increasing number of emergency department (ED) visits often correlates with ED crowding and delays in care. This problem highlights the need for ED triage systems that accurately differentiate and prioritise critically ill from stable patients, enabling efficient allocation of finite ED resources. Currently, the Emergent Severity...Read more
2018 14 Nov
A new study has validated potential biomarkers for a sepsis-triage model to distinguish sepsis patients requiring care in the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) from sepsis identified in the paediatric emergency department (PED) that does not require ICU admission. The study, led by Beata Mickiewicz and colleagues from the University of Calgary...Read more
2018 25 Sep
How can we predict errors in the emergency department? Clinician judgement is key, said Eric Dryver, speaking at the European Society for Emergency Medicine annual congress, held in Glasgow earlier this month. Dryver, emergency medician physician at Skåne University Hospital in Lund, Sweden, and chair of the EUSEM education committee, said that in...Read more
2018 18 Sep
Doctors are responsible for reducing antibiotic usage in their hospital, region and country. At the same time, emergency medicine doctors have the responsibility to treat very sick patients - with suspected sepsis and septic shock, efficiently. This was the conundrum addressed by Christian Backer Mogensen, consultant in infectious medicine and emergency...Read more
2018 12 Sep
Nobody goes into emergency medicine to care for dying patients, but people do die in emergency departments, and end-of-life care could and should be better in the ED, said Mary Dawood, RN, of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, speaking at the European Society of Emergency Medicine congress in Glasgow this week. She noted that EOLC in...Read more
2018 23 Aug
Human factors are a well recognised cause of discrepancies in patient care that can lead to adverse outcomes. In a busy Emergency Department (ED) setting, when dealing with the sickest patients at all hours and with a rotating workforce, there is an increased potential for inconsistent care despite clear evidence based protocols and guidelines on...Read more
2018 18 Jul
Emergency department (ED) patients with suspected infection admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) are associated with lower in-hospital mortality and costs than those initially admitted to the floor or discharged home, according to a new study published in the journal Critical Care. "Our findings demonstrate worse outcomes and higher costs...Read more
2018 01 Jun
Presents the main principles of the Norwegian acute healthcare system. Norway is a rather small country with a population of about 5.3 million. More than half of these inhabitants are located in and around the larger cities, with about a million in the capital region of Oslo. Hence, significant parts of the country are rural, with fjords...Read more
2018 29 May
In the Procalcitonin Antibiotic Consensus Trial (ProACT), the use of a procalcitonin-guided antibiotic prescription guideline did not result in less exposure to antibiotics than did usual care among patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with suspected lower respiratory tract infection. Overuse of antibiotics is common in infections...Read more
2017 14 Nov
Identifying headache patients who are at risk of aneurysms can be difficult as they often seem otherwise well. In view of this, researchers at The Ottawa Hospital (Ontario) have developed a new tool designed to help emergency departments identify high-risk patients and improve survival rates. The tool is called The Ottawa Subarachnoid Haemorrhage Rule...Read more
2017 03 Oct
Researchers in Spain have developed a new tool to better assess risk of mortality from heart failure. The simple tool makes use of readily available data to accurately estimate the 30-day mortality risk for patients admitted to the emergency department with acute heart failure, according to a study published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Emergency...Read more
2017 11 Jul
A system of rapid review of critically ill patients in the emergency department (ED) is associated with reduced ED length of stay and improved intensive care unit (ICU) outcomes, suggests a new study to appear in Journal of Critical Care. You might also like : Fluid Responsiveness in Emergency Care In 2012, a National Emergency Access Target...Read more
2017 27 Jun
Sepsis most often presents to the emergency department (ED), and delayed detection is harmful. The white blood count (WBC) is often used to detect sepsis in the ED. New research shows that volume increases of circulating immune cells, or monocytes, adds value to the WBC for early sepsis detection in the ED. "This study shows that the monocyte distribution...Read more
2016 09 Dec
INTRODUCTION In Germany, emergency departments (EDs) often suffer from overcrowding, which may lead to stressful working conditions, increased risks for patients and costs for additional staff, as well as for investments in equipment. Furthermore, overcrowding has the potential to extend patient waiting times, in some cases rising up...Read more