Happy Birthday Let us start by wishing the Royal College of Emergency Medicine a very happy 50th birthday. Thanks to everyone who has got us this far and thanks to those who will take EM in the UK and across the globe even further in the next 50 years. As for the journal, then another […]
Category: resuscitation
Safety Newsflash! Retained Guidewires.
If you’re a member of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in the UK, you may have noticed an email pop up in your inbox recently, a safety newsflash on retained guidewires. RCEM put these out every few months, containing helpful and brief information in the crusade against events that should never happen, as […]
Lessons from Camels. EMJ Blog.
Life long learning and developing is vital for the good ED practitioner, treatments change, pathologies change and even opinions change over months and years, and we on the front line must continually adapt and change with them. To highlight the importance of this I would like to tell you a story. It is a story […]
Should More Emergency Physicians be ‘Piloting British Airways’? The Musings of a Trainee: EMJ
Emergency physicians (EPs) routinely manage the sick, undifferentiated patients in whom life-saving interventions need to be executed rapidly. Our Royal College defines emergency medicine as ‘the specialty in which time is critical.’ In severe illness or injury, ‘A’ comes first. Securing a definitive airway is the gateway to the rest of critical care; without one, our […]
Learning from Major Incidents
In this month’s EMJ, David Lowe, Jonathan Millar and colleagues from Glasgow Royal Infirmary (GRI) and the University of Glasgow share their experience gained from the tragic events that unfolded in their city in 2013 and 2014. The first – where a police helicopter crashed into the Clutha Vaults pub due to a fuel management […]
The Role of IO in Trauma: A #FOAMed Debate
The Emergency Medicine Journal recently published a review of intraosseous access experience from the Royal Army Medical Corps. This review documents 1,014 IO devices and 5,124 infusions of blood products, medications, and fluids. There were no major complications, and the rate of minor complications was extraordinarily low – the most frequent being device failure, occurring […]
What’s your target BP for ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm?
A couple of years ago I was very (very, very) peripherally involved in an RCT investigating the management of ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm. The IMPROVE trial was well designed and reported it’s results in 2014. The abstract is shown below, and I must admit that to my surprise there did not appear to be […]
How Are We Accelerating Knowledge Translation?
In contemporary medicine, the first exposure to new evidence comes first in abstracts and conference presentations, filters through peer-review into journal publication, and, finally, into textbooks. Then, the process of translating knowledge into practice change takes place, slowly percolating into the current physician base through guidelines and expert recommendation, followed by trainees indoctrinated into the […]