-
Do you know how to increase the likelihood that a patient will tell you about abuse? During 293 audiotaped interactions with ED staff assessing for intimate partner violence (IPV), 77 patients disclosed experience with IPV.
-
When guidelines for severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) are followed, deaths decrease by 50% and patients with poor outcomes decrease from 34% to 19%, according to a recent study.
-
If you assume that patients complaining of headache are nontherapeutic medication seekers or chronic complainers, you risk undertriaging these patients, warns Rebekah Child, RN, MSN, CEN, CNIV, an ED nurse at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
-
An elderly woman tells ED triage nurses she's had an excruciating, unrelenting headache for the past two days.
-
The next time an older person arrives in your ED with atypical or vague symptoms, an online resource could help you assess that patient.
-
General malaise is the only complaint of a 77-year-old man and, other than a low-grade fever, his vital signs are within normal limits. But while waiting to be seen, he becomes mildly disoriented, tachycardic, and hypotensive, and he is diagnosed with urosepsis. If the changes in this patient's status go unnoticed, he could suffer circulatory collapse.
-
-
A paper reporting the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists (ACOG) association's position on how far doctors can go in conscientious refusal to perform abortions and prescribe emergency contraception is an attack on "pro-life" physicians, according to two medical associations.
-
Placebos have been a part of medicine since ancient times, and remain both clinically relevant and philosophically interesting, according to a University of Chicago medical student whose research has shown that 45% of Chicago-area internists use placebos in their practice.
-
Lots has been written about physicians' unwillingness to report medical errors, but findings from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) suggest it's not a lack of honesty and ethics at work it's a lack of confidence in current reporting systems.
