BACKGROUND Medical errors and preventable adverse events are a major cause of concern, especially in the emergency department (ED) where its prevalence has been reported to be roughly of 5-10% of visits. Due to a short length of stay, emergency patients are often managed by a sole physician - in contrast with other specialties where they can benefit from multiples handover, ward rounds and staf...

The fast-paced and multifaceted nature of patient care in the emergency department makes our discipline especially prone to errors and adverse events. In recent years, strategies such as formal communication and medical team training have been proposed as potential means to enhance patient safety. In many ways, practice dynamics particular to the emergency department make this setting almost id...

METHODS: By using state-level ambulatory surgery data from 4 states, we identified adult patients who underwent common facial, breast, or abdominal contouring procedures from January 2009 to September 2013. Our primary outcomes were hospital based acute care encounters (inpatient admissions and emergency department visits), serious adverse events, and cumulative healthcare charges within 30 day...

BACKGROUND Several efforts have been made to assure and to improve the quality of procedural sedation and analgesia (PSA) performed by emergency physicians (EPs) in The Netherlands. This study investigated the current PSA practice and competences of EPs in both adult and paediatric patients. In particular, if residency and current training, awareness of guidelines is sufficient for registered E...

We present the Civique system for emergency detection in urban areas by monitoring micro blogs like Tweets. The system detects emergency related events, and classifies them into appropriate categories like “fire”, “accident”, “earthquake”, etc. We demonstrate our ideas by classifying Twitter posts in real time, visualizing the ongoing event on a map interface and alerting users with options to ...

Background Cognitive aids help the stressed practitioner in an emergency setting carry out complex tasks. Ideally, they ensure the completion of key steps and prevent unnecessary ones. Malignant hyperthermia is an emergency event that lends itself to the use of a cognitive aid. Experts associated with the Malignant Hyperthermia Association (MHAUS) first developed a cognitive aid in the form of ...

There is increasing role of computed tomographic (CT) in the assessment of acute chest pain in the emergency department especially when the diagnosis is not clear. We report a case where non ECG gated contrast enhanced CT in the emergency department for rule-out of pulmonary embolus guided to the actual diagnosis, which was, acute coronary event, as evidenced by the presence of perfusion defect.

OBJECTIVES To describe the clinical characteristics and outcomes of a large, multicenter cohort of pediatric medical emergency team (MET) events occurring in US hospitals reported to the American Heart Association's Get With the Guidelines-Resuscitation registry. METHODS We analyzed consecutive pediatric (<18 years) MET events reported to the registry from January 2006 to February 2012. RES...

This position paper outlines an ongoing research project that aims to incorporate crowdsourcing as part of an emergency response system. The proposed system's novelty is that it integrates crowdsourcing into its architecture to analyze and structure social media content posted by microbloggers and service users, including emergency response coordinators and victims, during the event or disaster...

The aim of the paper is to highlight topics pertinent to present-day birth control and contraception. On the background of new developments in the pharmacology of birth control and family planning, the paper discusses their relevance for improving the most efficacious methods of contraception, i.e., Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) and Emergency Contraception (EC). In doing so, it fo...