How often has this happened to you —
You are in the middle of a sterile procedure (chest tube, suturing, central venous line, lumbar puncture) and you realize that you need more lidocaine to provide better topical anesthesia. You don’t have any more in your kit and you are alone in the room with the patient.
“Uh, can someone help me out there?”
I came across this great SlideShare set on some simple rules on slide design to make your Powerpoint-based talk great. Think of your favorite speakers (i.e. the Mattus and Weingarts) and inevitably part of the reason they are so great is because of their slide design.
At the CDEM meeting during the SAEM national meeting this past week, the keynote speaker (Dr. Charles Hatem from Harvard) mentioned a great editorial article called “Inconvenient Truths About Effective Clinical Teaching.”
Here’s a summary of the opinion article from Lancet:
How great would it be if you could give patients concrete numbers when you are talking about cancer risk and CT? Well, Dr. Hans Rosenberg (Univ of Ottawa) has come up with just such a table.
Using this table you can say that the risk is about “one in …”
Adapted from [1]
Go to ALiEM (PV) Cards for more resources.
This is a common question that I get from my fellow emergency physicians. They think that social media applications are for people who have nothing better to do than to read/write about trivial personal opinions.
Fingertips can get injured in a variety of ways such as machetes, meat grinders, and broken glass. You name it, and we’ve probably seen it. Some don’t actually need anything invasive done because the skin is basically just torn off. The wound just needs to be irrigated, explored, and then bandaged to allow for secondary wound closure.
What do you do if the finger injury keeps oozing and the finger tip is too painful for the patient to apply firm pressure? Poking the finger with 2 needles to perform a digital block seems a bit overkill.
The national SAEM meeting in Boston just concluded and was a success. As part of the SAEM Social Media Committee, I was encouraged to see how many people were tweeting events from the meeting. Check out the tweets with the #SAEM11 hashtag.
To view beyond the most recent 100 tweets, you can view here.