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While the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta has been calling on EDs to routinely test patients for HIV since 2006, the practice is hardly widespread.
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Noting that opioid analgesics are among the drugs most often associated with adverse drug events, the Joint Commission has issued a Sentinel Alert, urging hospitals to step up their efforts to prevent complications and deaths from use of these powerful drugs.
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People understand that natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes are going to happen every year. That's why EDs across the country routinely conduct practice drills so that they have plans in place to deal with mass-casualty events.
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Abnormal movements, outside of seizure and ataxia, are an uncommon chief complaint among children presenting to the emergency department. A working knowledge of movement disorder phenomenology, etiology, differential diagnosis, and associated potentially life-threatening conditions is essential for emergency physicians. Each movement disorder and its clinical considerations will be discussed in detail in the article.
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Coughs and hiccups are common emergency department complaints. While the majority of their causes are benign, patients with these symptoms can suffer from significant distress and impaired quality of life. Most patients with these symptoms can be effectively managed by understanding the pathophysiology and differential diagnosis of these symptoms and by using evidence-based therapy. It is important for the physician to be aware of the emergent conditions that may present with these seemingly benign complaints.
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A patient handover, or handoff, in health care can be defined as the transfer of information, professional responsibility, and accountability between individuals and teams. Handoffs represent a time of particular patient vulnerability to complications and medical errors, and with the current focus on safety an increasing amount of attention has been devoted to characterizing and improving them.
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Great strides have been made over the last couple of decades in the management of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), and widespread implementation of such interventions as aspirin, beta-blockers, and prompt reperfusion therapy has contributed to substantially reduced mortality from this leading killer.
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Investigators representing three professional societies carried out a point-prevalence assessment of the use of systemic antifungal therapy (SAT) in patients in ICUs in France and Belgium on December 8, 2008.
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Investigators at the University of Iowa hospital collected culture samples from vinyl privacy curtains at 30 inpatient locations, half of them in the medical and surgical ICUs. Curtains at each location were sampled twice weekly.
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