It’s your first Emergency Medicine shift in clerkship. You’re asked to see a 25-year-old female with abdominal pain. What are things you want to make sure you ask about and examine, and how should you document your assessment without spending most of your shift on paperwork? Documenting patient encounters is a core skill in all medical specialties; in fact, it is a legal requirement of all physicians providing patient care. In the fast-paced …
CanadiEM Frontline Primer – The Emergency Medicine Mindset
Overview The following are three key steps that you can take to start “thinking like an emergency physician”. Unlike other clinical services, the emergency department is often quite chaotic and requires a different mindset for organization of time and workflow. Check out this video made by the McMaster University Demystifying Medicine program alumni. Step 1: Stable vs. Unstable Look at your patient. The emergency medicine mindset is that you should be addressing your …
Practicing emergency medicine in New Zealand: A Canadian’s perspective
Dr. Rob Woods is a well known Emergency Physician and program director for the FRCPC Emergency Medicine Program at the University of Saskatchewan, who recently practiced emergency medicine in New Zealand on a one-year sabbatical. Here, he provides us some with answers to many questions he has been getting, insights into the country, lifestyle and medicine from abroad. Why did you go to New Zealand? We also thought it would be great for …
Key Clerkship Skills: Help us to identify them!
Editor’s note: The CanadiEM team believes that it was import to consult stakeholders when developing new content. The bleeding and clotting needs assessment that we conducted previously has been completed and we will soon be publishing content directed at meeting the needs that we identified. This post contains a needs assessment directed at the most junior members of the EM family – our clinical clerks. It is very short! (What you see below is all you have …
Emergency medicine autonomy is under siege
The opposite of a motivated physician is a burnt-out physician. In healthcare, preventing physician burnout and promoting physician wellness is of increasing importance. Healthcare organizations are under tremendous pressure to retain quality physicians and push physicians to perform at the highest level possible. The key to getting these results is to truly understand what motivates physicians to do their job, and to foster it. I recently watched a YouTube video1 that summarized a Daniel …
Tips & Myths for Competency Based Assessment in a New Era of CBME
Competency Based Medical Education (CBME) curriculums are being launched across Canada for all Emergency Medicine Residency Programs in July 2018, although some programs have begun to make change as early as this year!