You are working a busy shift in your busy emergency department (ED), when you are called by the microbiologist about a positive blood culture gram stain on a patient discharged home. You call the patient’s caregiver and they relay that the patient is doing well. You believe that the culture may be a contaminant from skin flora, but ask the patient and their caregiver to return to the ED for reassessment, possible admission …
HiQuiPs: Ontario Return Visit Quality Program Part 2 – a Health Informatics Perspective
Welcome back to our second post on the Ontario Emergency Department (ED) Return Visit Quality Program (RVQP). In our first post we discussed the utility of return ED visits as triggers for potential quality improvement (QI) initiatives. We also discussed the scope of this program, which is a provincial-level program with many stakeholder organizations. The program was built with the goal of promoting “high-quality ED care by helping clinicians and hospitals identify, audit …
Special Post – Ontario ED Return Visit Quality Program Part 1
You are midway through a busy shift when a colleague approaches you and utters the dreaded “Remember that patient you saw…?!”. This time, it is about an elderly patient you saw the previous week with chest pain that you sent home. And now they are back! You finish the rest of your shift – a bit distracted – and you start reflecting back on that patient. Did I miss anything? You wonder about …
CAEP FEI | A Peer-Reviewed Instructional Video is as Effective as a Standard Recorded Didactic Lecture in Medical Trainees Performing Chest Tube Insertion: A Randomized Control Trial
Mark is a first year emergency medicine resident waiting in the trauma bay for an incoming thirty year old male with a penetrating stab wound to the chest. He wonders if he will have to insert a chest tube for this patient. It has been a long time since he did one in medical school and his memory of the steps is fuzzy. He wishes there was a tool to help him learn …
Designing a QI project – a Comparison of Quality Improvement and Traditional Research Paradigms
You are attending your local ED monthly rounds where a journal club is being held discussing a Quality Improvement (QI) published paper. As the rounds progress, your presenter critiques the article and discusses perceived weaknesses including a small sample size, lack of randomization and blinding, and lists many different possible biases in this project. You reflect back on your previous journal clubs and wonder whether it makes sense to apply a research-style critical …