We had our inaugural residency retreat last month! Our guest speaker was Dr Paul Parks – a humble affable family man and Emergency Physician who was unwittingly thrust into the public eye after Emails were leaked documenting failures in the Alberta Health Care system resulting in ER “suboptimal outcomes”. Dr Parks and colleagues documented what they felt were deleterious outcomes in patients in the waiting room of the University of Alberta Hospital …
Trust me! (no explanation required)
Two stories: ONE Yesterday I had a patient come to the ER because she didn’t trust the family doctor she had just seen at the clinic who “gave me a prescription for puffers worth hundreds of dollars without even listening to her chest!”‘ I did my usual and diagnosed the child with reactive airways (likely asthma due to positive family history) … I told the parent that I agreed with the original diagnosis, …
Courage to Make Lemonade
I just found out that a colleague and mentor [to whom I owe much] had a skiing accident in which he broke his neck. It’s early days, but the outcome may not be so good. From what I hear he was joking around before going in for an 11-hour spine operation. He was joking about trying to take down a tree with his head [and was haggling a price for the skis he …
Thou Shalt Not Oompa-Loompantasize Children
Got a letter of praise forwarded to the ER manager by the Patient Advocate Office the other day … ZZZZZT! Wha? Did he just say “praise” or did he say “complaint” … [re-read … no it says “praise”]. Staggering! Furthermore it came from a patient encounter that I had in paeds ER. Hmm … I thought about posting a screen-capture of the letter, but it’s honestly embarrassing to receive such praise [and I’ve …
Reflections on Efficiency
I was at a great conference on Emergency Medicine in San Francisco. My wife and I went to a diner for breakfast. While there I was struck by how efficient the whole experience was. I think that things that made this experience really efficient were: Enough space so we didn’t wait in line Menu’s already on table Menu itself was stuff that they were really good at and relatively simple to create – …
Reflections on Stewardship
I came across this posting from one of my fav blogs [here’s the original link]. It made me think about stewardship. What is stewardship and why is it important? So I did a quick lit search and came across an article from PubMed. The article talks about how to start good stewardship regarding antibiotics in the ER. In fact most of the literature seems to centre around antimicrobial stewardship. I was reflecting on …