Five practical tips on surviving the Emergency Medicine Royal College Exam!
Tiny Tip: START Triage Protocol RPM – 30 – 2 – Can Do
If you’re like me, you appreciate the value of triage systems in emergency medicine and prehospital care but find it hard to remember the components of each. The START Triage (Simple Triage And Rapid Treatment) protocol was designed to quickly assess victims of mass casualty, categorising them into four colour-coded groups that communicate the urgency of treatment.1 Patients designated ‘green’ are the walking wounded; these individuals can move and follow commands. They should …
Narrative Medicine and Resilience in Emergency Medicine
How do we treat suffering? It’s simple enough to trawl the depths of wisdom collected in Rosen’s. Journal clubs, podcasts, and blogs keep us abreast of the latest updates to evidence-based practice. There is no substitute for the experience gained on clinical shifts. Reading around cases we see in the Emergency Department helps. We may struggle to memorize every list, table, and pathway, but the material itself is pretty straightforward. It’s all laid …
Tiny Tip: SCALP for the Layers of the Scalp
At some point during clinical teaching in emergency medicine, someone is likely to ask you about the layers of the scalp, and Rosen’s provides a helpful mnemonic for remembering them1: S – skin C – connective tissue A – aponeurosis L – loose areolar tissue P – periosteum You may be asking yourself why you would need to know about the layers of the scalp. Isn’t this just the sort of trivia you …
Tiny Tips: How ready is this child?
Not many neonates are delivered in the Emergency Department, but those rare babies who greet the world for the first time under the fluorescent lights of the resuscitation bay are precisely those who warrant urgent and concise communication about their clinical status to our obstetric, paediatric, and neonatologist colleagues. The Apgar score is an assessment tool designed for precisely this kind of communication. Developed by Virginia Apgar, an American obstetrical anaesthesiologist, the Apgar score …
Tiny Tips: History taking in a returning traveler
Following a trip abroad, up to 8% of travelers will present for medical attention1. Many of these complaints are mild, but some are life-threatening. A detailed travel history and history of the presenting illness are essential in identifying serious illnesses and preventing over-investigation of more common non-dangerous infectious complaints (i.e. URTI’s). An easy mnemonic to help you remember key aspects of the travel history is TRAVEL: [bg_faq_start] T – Time of onset The timing …