-
Consider this scenario: During a malpractice trial involving a patient's adverse outcome in your ED, the jury learns that you've been in the habit of accepting expensive dinners and vacations from drug companies.
-
A 15-year-old girl's mother demands that you give her daughter a pregnancy test, but the child refuses. What do you do?
-
Low back pain (LBP) is a common (more than 3 million ED visits per year in the United States) yet typically benign ED complaint.
-
The scenario of a resident physician who is involved in a medical malpractice case occurs more commonly than you might think in the day-to-day practice of emergency medicine.
-
Few sounds or smells in the emergency department (ED) get our attention as easily as vomiting. In response, we might reflexively order our "one-size-fits-all" standard antiemetic and begin by assuming that this is probably just another case of "gastroenteritis." There are, however, several antiemetics to choose from, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, as well as a myriad of diagnostic possibilities to consider.
-
A leading official from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in Boston says that the impetus behind its list of hospital-acquired conditions for which it will no longer pay the "bump-up" in the complexity rate is a desire to improve quality of care. Some of the fears expressed by ED experts may be unfounded, he says.
-
In a move that has generated great concern in the ED community, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing to more than double the list of hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) for which it will no longer pay hospitals at a higher rate for the resulting increased costs of care.
-
On April 10, 2008, 360 nurses in EDs nationwide began using the Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) program, an alcohol screening and intervention tool kit provided free by the Emergency Nurses Association (ENA).
-
The "child-friendly" environment of the pediatric ED at Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Children's Hospital in Charleston is a dead giveaway as to the kind of patients the department sees.
-
ED managers are well aware of the need for triage protocols during a disaster and have incorporated them into their disaster response plans. However, plans vary among facilities and within regions.