It has been a slower than usual night shift, and you have just led a resuscitation for a COVID-19 patient in your ED. Your ED has experienced several policy changes in recent weeks, from new standards for the use of personal protective equipment to policies for mitigating risk during aerosol-generating medical procedures to guidelines on how to best communicate between resuscitation and support teams. You wonder how your department can implement multiple changes …
How to Read and Make Statistical Process Charts – Part 1
You are attending your monthly ED business meeting. There has been a recent effort to decrease the time it takes a patient to be transferred to the imaging department for a STAT CT scan. The project team has concluded the first two PDSA cycles after wide stakeholder engagement, and a root cause analysis. Two interventions were carried out: one, redesigning the process for patient pick up and transport, and two, a new expedited …
How to Present a Case in the Emergency Department
Presenting a case in the ED is important for a number of reasons. Not only does better communication result in better patient care, but it’s also a great learning opportunity and your chance as a clerk to impress your attending. Presenting a case well conveys your level of knowledge and understanding to an attending, which allows them to accurately assess and teach to your weaknesses. It also illustrates that you can create a …
Teaching That Counts: Tips on Receiving Feedback
This is part of the CanadiEM Teaching That Counts Infographic Series, where we take the current research and evidence on how to teach well in the emergency department and distill it down into bite-sized chunks that are rapidly digestible and memorable. Teaching That Counts: Tips on Receiving Feedback Do you ever have difficulty receiving feedback from learners? Is receiving feedback as a teacher something you actively avoid? Do you find feedback challenging to …
Requesting Consults in the Emergency Department
You are halfway through your very first Emergency Medicine shift. You have a 23 year old male patient who appears to be a slam dunk for acute appendicitis – he has symptoms that are consistent with the presentation, pain on palpation at McBurney’s point, a high white count, and CT findings of appendicitis. Your staff is being pulled in a thousand different directions, and asks you if you feel comfortable calling General Surgery …
How to Read Patient Monitors
It’s your first day as a clerk in the Emergency Department and your staff has asked you to see an 80 year old patient with known COPD presenting with increasing shortness of breath. He reminds you to check the patient monitor when you go in there to look for any abnormalities and to record a new set of vitals on the chart. Patient monitors can be overwhelming early in your training when you’re …