A little over a year ago, I was working a shift in the emergency department when I noticed an enthusiastic consultant briskly wheeling a portable ultrasound machine to a patient’s bedside. I introduced myself and asked if I could observe the scan. Until this point, ultrasound had retained a certain mystique. However, that was quickly erased by a deep, yet efficient, bedside lesson in anatomy, physiology and clinical medicine that left a lasting …
Type and SCREAM STAT! Futility of ordering routine Blood Type and Screens in the ER
My awesome hematology colleague Dr Karen Dallas was here again – giving us a learn-on on a recent audit of routine Type and Screen testing in our ER’s Background: Our biggest ER routinely sends a STAT Type & Screen to the Transfusion Medicine Lab [TML]. These requests are often accompanied with a request for blood. Sometimes these tests are performed appropriately for emergent cases, but the TML saw an opportunity to study this …
Death of the Health Council of Canada. (Wait, what’s that?)
Roy Romanow, the former Saskatchewan premier, planted the seed for the formation of the Health Council of Canada (HCC) in 2004. The idea was to have a national body that will monitor and report on health dollars transfers from the federal government to the provinces. In a healthcare system fragmented into 14 pieces, the HCC was promoted as the duct tape that will hold the system together; the vehicle through which we can …
Boston Bombing: A Wake Up Call for the rest of us.
The bombing of innocents at the Boston Marathon will forever be remembered alongside similar tragedies such as 9/11, not only for the resulting gruesome injuries and deaths that’s been engraved into our minds by the media, but for the sheer shock of witnessing something so unfathomable actually happening in reality. But as shocking as it was, the local healthcare response was surprisingly prompt, efficient, and effective. What we witnessed in the immediate aftermath …
Emotional Intelligence and How It Can Make You a Selfish Altruist
I am a fan of Twitter. I use it to “keep my finger on the femoral pulse of Emergency medicine“. Thanks to one of my Tweeps [twitter peeps] Dr Sam Ko [Twitter link] I came across this talk on Emotional Intelligence by author Chade-Meng Tan. You can see the talk yourself here. I have recently taken interest in mindfulness [check out additional resources at the end of this post]. I have also been trying …
A Pictorial Approach to Ultrasound in Shock
I just finished preparing an introductory talk on shock & ultrasound. Ultrasound in shock in 50 minutes! After having struggled considerably with the breadth of the topic, i struggled even more with the summary. How does one sum up such a huge topic? In the end, I decided to go with a picture (we all know the saying). Learning theories suggest that in order for a person to learn something new, that new …