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While assessing a 40-year-old male who complained of abdominal pain, nurses did a routine mental health screening, which included asking if he was currently suicidal. "He answered 'yes' to all of the questions," says MaryEllen Swanson, RN, a senior staff nurse in the ED at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. "It would have been missed if the screening had not been done."
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Is your intubated patient being transporte d for radiological studies? This increases the chance of disastrous consequences due to an unrecognized displaced or dislodged endotracheal (ET) tube, warns Catherine Payne, RN, MSN, CCRN, CEN, an ED nurse at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.
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If a patient reports taking antibiotics during your medication reconciliation, you may learn these were prescribed for a urinary tract infection or dental work months earlier. "For whatever reason, they didn't take the antibiotics as prescribed, and now they will take a pill whenever they have a sore throat," says Kimberly Barker, BS, RN, CEN, an ED supervisor at St. David's South Austin (TX) Medical Center.
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Perioperative cardiac events are the leading cause of surgical mortality.
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This report is from the ARISTOTLE trial, which was just reported at the recent European Society of Cardiology meeting in Paris.
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While 16% of patients with candidemia had possible or probable ocular involvement, only 6 of 370 (1.6%) developed endophthalmitis.
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Adding gabapentin to valacyclovir early in the treatment of acute herpes zoster may reduce the incidence of postherpetic neuralgia.
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Failed extubation is more likely to occur in elderly patients with underlying chronic cardiac or pulmonary disease, and patients in whom it occurs have substantially worse clinical outcomes than those who do not require reintubation.
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