BACKGROUND The ability of many intensive care unit (ICU) technologies to prolong life has led to an outcomes-oriented approach to technology assessment, focusing on morbidity and mortality as clinically important end points. With advanced life support, however, the therapeutic goals sometimes shift from extending life to allowing life to end. The objective of this study was to understand the pu...

The clinical syndrome of heart failure is increasing in prevalence, as is the number of elderly persons with heart failure. Increasing frailty and progression of heart failure in large numbers of patients means clinicians are increasingly challenged to provide end-of-life care for heart failure patients. End-of-life care has been little studied, but management can be understood from early clini...

More than 7.5 million people in the world are affected by spinal cord injury (SCI). In this study, we aimed to analyze the effect of training in advanced trauma life support (ATLS) on the kinematics of the spine when performing different mobilization and immobilization techniques on patients with suspected SCI. A quasi-experimental study, clinical simulation, was carried out to determine the ef...

PURPOSE The constellation of advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) events, such as gas embolism, local anesthetic overdose, and spinal bradycardia, in the perioperative setting differs from events in the pre-hospital arena. As a result, modification of traditional ACLS protocols allows for more specific etiology-based resuscitation. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Perioperative arrests are both uncommon an...

Critical care environments are complex and dynamic. To adapt to such environments, clinicians may be required to make alterations to their workflows resulting in deviations from standard procedures. In this work, deviations from standards in trauma critical care are studied. Thirty trauma cases were observed in a Level 1 trauma center. Activities tracked were compared to the Advance Trauma Life...

The surgical needs of our environment have necessitated an increased demand for quality/improved anaesthetic care; where local anaesthetic techniques would not suffice. Also increased awareness amongst the populace has brought about this need. The need to improve the indices of maternal and child morbidity and mortality which in international circles are presently yardsticks of measuring develo...

Background The current resuscitation guidelines state that basic life support (BLS) should be conducted in two minute cycles. This regime dictates the frequencies of medicine administration and defibrillation during advanced life support in cardiac arrests. Earlier work has shown that participants in a cardiac arrest teams lose their time perception and both overand underestimate elapsed time. ...

Basic life support (BLS) and even advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) should be an integral and mandatory component of the undergraduate curriculum in all local medical schools’, perhaps for students in their penultimate or final year. Refresher courses and periodic mandatory recertification however is necessary to avoid de-skilling. Simply increasing the period of housemanship training alone ...