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Concussion laws often require evaluation to be done by a particular class of health care provider one trained in the evaluation and management of a concussion, says William M. McDonnell, MD, JD, an associate professor of pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
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Kansas court rules that a patient had not come to the emergency department by virtue of a clinic physician calling and asking the hospital to accept the patient. Furthermore, the court determined that EMTALAs duty to accept a patient in transfer is only actuated when the hospital is called by another hospital, not by a clinic or physicians office.
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If the plaintiff had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an emergency physician (EP) made a wrong decision, there are so many gray zones in medicine that there would never be a plaintiff judgment again, says Kevin Klauer, DO, EJD, chief medical officer for Emergency Medicine Physicians in Canton, OH, and a member of the board of directors at Physicians Specialty Ltd. Risk Retention Group.
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The concussion laws passed by 39 states establish an expectation for emergency physicians (EPs) involved in the case of a student athlete who has potentially suffered a concussion to have a very low threshold for making the diagnosis of concussion and removing the child from any potential for further injury, says Roger J. Lewis, MD, PhD, a professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Torrance.
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Below is a list of some things that EPs should consider to be red flags for abuse, according to Daniel M. Lindberg, MD, an attending physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Womens Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, both in Boston:
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Michael Gerardi, MD, FAAP, FACEP, director of pediatric emergency medicine at Goryeb Childrens Hospital in Morristown, NJ, reports that he is aware of several recent lawsuits naming an emergency physician (EP) for failure to diagnose child abuse.
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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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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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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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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.
