Critical Care
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Airway Management in Older Adult Trauma Patients
Older adult trauma patients present unique challenges for the emergency care provider. Airway anatomic and physiologic changes associated with age may pose difficulties in the setting of trauma and may affect the overall care of the patient. Understanding the geriatric variations and developing alternative strategies is critical in the acute care setting.
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‘Code Critical’ Process Speeds Care to Critically Ill Patients Who Present to ED
In 2016, a suburban California emergency department began working on a new alert process designed to ensure medical patients not covered by alerts already in place would receive the same type of rapid, timely response that other alerts trigger. The resulting approach, dubbed “code critical,” has proven successful at accelerating care to a broad category of critically ill patients.
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Families’ Surprising Opinions on End-of-Life ICU Care
Intensive care units may be associated with poor-quality end-of-life care. A recent study’s findings call that assumption into question — at least from the family’s perspective.
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Ethicists Offer Much-Needed Support to Clinicians with Moral Distress
The issue of moral distress is nothing new in healthcare, but the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the problem. Read on to learn how ethicists can help colleagues sort through unusual feelings.
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Making Critical Care Triage Policies Transparent to Patients, Community
Certain hospitals are including information on their critical care triage policies in admission packets to explain how care or supplies will be allocated if rationing becomes necessary. Some clinicians feel ethically obligated to inform everyone up front of the possibility. Others think it is better to do so only if and when it becomes necessary.
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Early Data on Remdesivir for Severe COVID-19: A Promising Start?
In this group of patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19, the majority of whom required invasive ventilation, 68% showed clinical improvement after treatment with remdesivir on a compassionate-use basis.
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Anticoagulation Therapy in Patients with Severe COVID-19
In a retrospective study involving 449 patients with severe COVID-19 requiring intensive care unit admission, those patients with a positive sepsis coagulation score or D-dimer greater than 3.0 mcg/mL who received prophylactic doses of low molecular weight heparin exhibited lower 28-day mortality.
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Managing COVID-19 Respiratory Failure: Is There a Perfect Management Strategy?
COVID-19 is a systemic disease that primarily injures the vascular endothelium, causing a unique lung injury in which different management strategies may need to be considered to address the specific physiology of each patient.
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Shipments of Remdesivir Begin Arriving at U.S. Hospitals
HHS requests facilities submit weekly data to facilitate distribution of the COVID-19 therapeutic.
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Opinions Evolve Regarding When to Ventilate a COVID-19 Patient
While there is no consensus on the issue, there are physicians from the frontlines in New York who now favor performing more noninvasive ventilation. Some are trying to avoid using a ventilator at all.