Just admit it: Deep in your heart you’ve always wanted to be an emergency medical technician, if at least for a few moments. If you’re located in San Ramon Valley, California, you can now live that dream: The local fire department has released an iPhone app that will alert you of any emergency activity in the area.
The well thought-out application will send out a push notification to users who have indicated that they are proficient in CPR whenever there is a cardiac emergency nearby. In addition, the closest public-access automated external defibrillator (AED) is located by the app. Current response status of dispatched units are shown and incident locations are pinpointed on an interactive map. There’s even a log of recent incidents including a photo gallery. For the old-school ham and scanner lads, it’s possible to listen in on live emergency radio traffic. The app is available for free.
This year has been a weird one for me and cancer. In the ER, we see cancer patients pretty infrequently. The occasional chemotherapy with fever, but that’s about it. I think the oncologists try hard to keep the patients out of the ER — to everybody’s benefit.
But this year, I’ve had a weird rash of cases where I’ve made primary diagnoses of cancer in the ER — several times over and over and over again. In ten years I don’t think I’ve made as many cancer diagnoses as I have this year alone. Just very strange.
Unfortunately, it came home to roost. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer last week. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
On a recent Friday night at the Boston Children’s Hospital ER, Dr. Fabienne Bourgeois was having difficulty treating a 17-year-old boy with a heart problem. The teen had transferred in from another hospital, where he had already had an initial work-up — including a chest X-ray and an EKG to check the heart’s electrical activity. But by the time he reached pediatrician Bourgeois, she had no access to those records so she gave him another EKG and chest X-ray. He was on multiple medications, and gave her a list of them. But his list differed from the one his mother gave doctors, neither of which matched the list his previous hospital had sent along.
This is excellent advice. Every ED has seen a patient, probably today, with “they saw me at the ER across town, but they didn’t do anything and I’m still sick.” While it makes some sense not to return to a restaurant that gave you a meal that wasn’t to your tastes, medicine is quite different.
If a patient gives me this history, I now have a blank slate, and need to essentially start at zero with them. So, I will do the correct workup to exclude the life threats based on the history and physical exam, which may be exactly the tests they had yesterday. I’m not going to assume they did the same tests, or that they were normal. It’s the standard of care at this time, and I have very, very few alternatives. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
In a desperate attempt to reach an even number it seems, hospital defibrillators were added to ECRI.org’s “Top 10 Health Technology Hazards” list of devices that threaten to kill or maim patients:
The Top 10 Health Technology Hazards list is updated each year based upon the prevalence and severity of incidents reported to ECRI Institute by healthcare facilities nationwide; information found in the Institute’s medical device problem reporting databases; and the judgment, analysis, and expertise of the organization’s multidisciplinary staff. Many of the items on this year’s list are well-recognized hazards with numerous reported incidents over the years.
If one honestly looks at the number of lives saved versus the number of deaths from defibrillators, I wonder how many of this highly-esteemed group of “multidisciplinary staff” of the ECRI might reconsider. Clearly, most of them have never been in a code situation.
– WesMusings of a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist.
One in two emergency care doctors will suffer a burnout during their career, according to a survey of French physicians, published online in Emergency Medicine Journal. The research was funded in part by the NEXT NURSES’ EXIT STUDY (‘Sustaining working ability in the nursing profession – investigation of premature departure from work’) project, which received more than EUR 2 million under the ‘Quality of life and management of living resources’ Programme of the EU’s Fifth Framework Programme (FP5).
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The responses showed that the prevalence of burnout was high, with 1 in 2 emergency care doctors identified as suffering from it, compared with more than 4 out of 10 of the representative sample. Physicians had the highest burnout rate in the two age groups, between 35 and 44 and between 45 and 54.
Expectedly, it’s international…
*This blog post was originally published at GruntDoc*
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