You have just finished seeing a 12-year-old boy who fell off the monkey bars about an hour ago. He has an obvious deformity to his right elbow and you suspect a displaced fracture that will require reduction. You would like to use procedural sedation to facilitate the reduction, but an empty granola bar wrapper stops you in your tracks. “We missed dinner rushing here and he couldn’t resist,” his mom says. Staring at …
HiQuiPs: Quality Improvement Projects and Patient Reported Measures
You are about to start a Quality Improvement (QI) project in your ED. You have noted that clinicians are being interrupted frequently by patient questions about the ED process and non patient care related inquiries. You have read previously that emergency physicians were being interrupted an average of 9.7 times per hour and may result in a break in tasks, which may lead to negative patient safety implications.1–3 You have set up a …
HiQuiPs: Year in Review
It has already been one year since we launched the HiQuiPs (Health informatics, Quality Improvement, Patient Safety) series on CanadiEM. This year we had fifteen contributors from across the country, and over 15,000 page visits to our series. Over the past year, we have produced thirteen posts over the HiQuiPs interrelated fields: Quality Improvement: On QI, we introduced what is quality of care in the ED, then to guide our readers through the …
HiQuiPs: Introduction to Biomedical and Health Informatics and its Role in the Emergency Department
You are attending your departmental monthly team meeting where you are all discussing your emergency department’s (ED) plan to switch to an electronic healthcare record (EHR) system in the coming months. There is also a lot of discussion about utilizing more health informatics tools to improve patient care. The presenter discusses the emerging role of health informatics in the ED, as well as the utility of connecting to regional health information exchanges. You …
HiQuiPs: Patient Safety in the ED Part 5 – Patient Communication in the ED
You are working in the Emergency Department on a day when it is busy and bed blocked. You assess a patient presenting with chest pain in the EMS offload area. Standing next to the stretcher, stopping to move every time a porter comes by with another patient stretcher, you sense that your patient is frustrated. After the initial workup is complete, you go to reassess your patient and review the results. As you …
HiQuiPs: Patient Safety in the ED Part 4 – Patient Handovers and Transitions of Care
You are beginning a morning shift in the Emergency Department when the overnight physician comes up to you and asks “Hey, can I give you a few handovers?” Your colleague provides a brief verbal handover for three patients and then says “this fourth one is a slam dunk admit, I’ve called the hospitalist and they’ll come to see the patient sometime this morning. Don’t even worry about it.” A few hours later, a …