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If your patient tells you he's had asthma since he was a teenager, don't assume that he must already know how to self-manage his condition.
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(Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part series on prevention of hospital-acquired infections in the ED. This month, we give strategies to improve compliance with hand hygiene, tips for cleaning the equipment you use and tell you how to determine if your patient has arrived at the ED with an infection. Last month, we covered avoiding infections when invasive procedures are performed, reducing the risk of infection with peripheral IV insertion, using alternatives to invasive procedures, giving central-line education to ED nurses, and decreasing the use of central lines and urinary catheters.)
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If a patient comes to your ED with a pre-existing infection that goes unnoticed, the insurer likely will to refuse to pay for treatment because it will presume wrongly that the condition was acquired in the hospital.
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With an expanded treatment window of 4.5 hours, more of your stroke patients are eligible for treatment with tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). Minutes still count, however.
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Fractures were the most common injury (41%) of more than 2 million elders coming to community EDs in 2006 because of fall injuries, says a new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
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More than 100,000 prosthetic heart valves are implanted each year in North America, and another 300,000 are done annually worldwide.
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A National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey indicates that the number of medical emergency department (ED) visits for psychiatric-related reasons jumped from 17.1 to 23.6 per 1,000 population between 1992 and 2001.
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A patient presents with a traumatic dirty wound which is not cleaned completely, and is closed by the ED physician with contaminant still present. The debris in the wound causes an infection resulting in tissue loss, which must be repaired by a plastic surgeon with an extensive skin graft.
