It’s a night shift, quieter than usual, though you wouldn’t say so out loud. As if the thought is enough to tempt fate, EMS rolls by. You got no patch, no heads up. “Car accident, just outside the hospital,” a paramedic calls as the patient is transferred onto the trauma stretcher. All you hear are unintelligible moans. All you see is blood streaming from a severely injured face. But the team’s already working, …
CAEP FEI | Trauma Resuscitation Using In Situ Simulation Team Training (TRUST) Study
Rob is a fourth year resident who is just walking out of the resuscitation bay after working with the team on a 45 year old man hit by a car. His attending staff asks him to think about areas where the resuscitation could have been improved. As Rob reflects on the experience, he wishes that there was a way to better analyze these events and find areas for improvement. Emergency medicine can often …
#EMexams | Crowd-sourcing questions for test-enhanced learning
CALLING ALL STAFF EMERGENCY PHYSICIANSWe need your help! Remember not so long ago when you wrote that little quiz known as the Emergency Medicine Board Exam? No? Have you gone through CBT to forget it? Think back to those days when your life revolved around that little quiz because BoringEM needs your help. What we’re up to: Introducing #EMexams We’re compiling a database of practice exam questions to help residents prepare for their …
Tiny Tip: HINTS exam to determine INFARCT
I recently wrote a post about the utility of the HINTS exam for patients who present with persistent vertigo known as acute vestibular syndrome (AVS). The available evidence suggests that this bedside exam is highly effective to help differentiate peripheral from central causes. And in one study, it may even be better than an MRI in the first 48hrs [1]! Finally, the answer to all of your vertiginous problems in the emergency department…except …
Boring Question: Dizzy, need a few HINTS?
The dizzy patient. If you haven’t seen a patient with this chief complaint, you either don’t work in an emergency department or you work in an imaginary emergency medicine utopia! Admit it, when you pick up the chart that reads “chief complaint…dizzy”, you look around inconspicuously, slowly replace that chart in the rack… and run quickly become preoccupied with some fascinating task from… oh… somewhere over there! But why? It is not because we …