OBJECTIVES To investigate the perspectives of patients with asthma on the use of an action plan and the implementation of this plan during an asthma attack that culminated in a visit to an emergency department. DESIGN Qualitative study. SETTING Tertiary teaching hospital, suburban hospital, and rural hospital. PARTICIPANTS 62 patients aged 18 to 69 years who presented to an emergency depa...

Acquired subglottic cysts can cause rapid development of respiratory distress. Subglottic cysts are a disease of premature infants and other pathologies of prematurity should be anticipated. Perioperative success is dependent on communication between surgeon and anesthesiologist. Contingency plans for an emergency surgical airway should be in place in the event of total airway obstruction.

Cardiac emergencies in the first year of life can be anxiety provoking for the health care provider. An understanding of the pathophysiology involved in the most common emergency department presentations is crucial to the development of appropriate treatment plans. This article discusses the most common causes of cyanotic and acyanotic heart disease in infants.

Plan recognition, cognitive workload estimation and human assistance have been extensively studied in the AI and human factors communities, but have seldom been integrated and evaluated as complete systems. In this paper, we develop an assistant agent architecture integrating plan recognition, current and future user information needs, workload estimation and adaptive information presentation t...

Over the past few decades, efforts to assess and understand the socio-economic factors that contribute to a population’s vulnerability to meteorological hazards have increased. It has become more common to use quantitative methods to approach this issue in State Hazard Mitigation Plans written by state emergency management agencies (e.g Odeh 2002, Simpson and Human 2008). Additionally, a report...

This chapter provides general principles on the roles and responsibilities of industry public authorities in responding to chemical accidents. Response activities should consist primarily implementing emergency plans, assuming that planning process was complete effective.

This paper discusses the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support improvisation in hospital emergency response. Important characteristics of emergencies and improvisation are identified. Real-time decision support, communication and coordination, and training for improvisation have been identified as three key areas where ICTs can support the use of improvisation. Thi...

This deliverable aims at investigating the capability of the OpenKnowledge framework to support centralised as well as decentralised architectures for information gathering in emergency response management. For this purpose, we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and through which existing emergency plans are modelled...