Early identification of patients who need hospitalization or patients who should be discharged would be helpful for the management of acute asthma in the emergency room. The objective of the present study was to examine the clinical and pulmonary functional measures used during the first hour of assessment of acute asthma in the emergency room in order to predict the outcome. We evaluated 88 pa...

OBJECTIVE To assess emergency physicians' perceptions of individual and system enablers to the use of tissue Plasminogen Activator in acute stroke. METHOD Australian fellows and trainees of Australasian College for Emergency Medicine completed a 57-item online survey assessing enablers to implementation of evidence-based practice across six domains: knowledge, skills, modelling, monitoring, f...

Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is the leading cause of death in exercising young athletes. Three factors-prompt recognition of SCA, the presence of a trained rescuer to initiate cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and access to early defibrillation through on-site automated external defibrillators (AEDs)-are critical to improving survival. Schools, clubs and organisations sponsoring athletic event...

Researchers have argued that social media, and in particular, Twitter, can be searched to improve “situational awareness” in emergency situations; that is, to provide objective, actionable, real-time information to first-responders. Prior studies have examined cases of very rare, catastrophic emergencies that took place over many days, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. We asked instead ...

Emergency rescues require that first responders provide support to evacuate injured and other civilians who are obstructed by the hazards. In this case, the emergency personnel can take actions strategically in order to rescue people maximally, efficiently and quickly. The paper studies the effectiveness of a random neural network (RNN)-based task assignment algorithm involving optimally matchi...

The number and kind of threats to life and property in an emergency situation is immense. Couple the magnitude of the potential threats with their typically rapid evolution from first detection to response, and the need for fast, coordinated response is apparent. This need is only increased by the threat of chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorist acts. The wide array of potential threats tog...