The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) collaborative has teamed up with the ALiEM and CanadiEM teams to introduce the official PECARN visual decision rule aid for pediatric blunt head trauma! This has been a 6 month collaboration focused on bringing evidence-based research to the bedside in pediatric emergency medicine (EM).
Welcome to the Toxicology Module! After carefully reviewing all relevant posts from the top 50 sites of the Social Media Index the ALiEM AIR Team is proud to present the highest quality toxicology content. Below we have listed our selection of the 6 highest quality blog posts within the past 12 months (as of January 2017) related to Toxicologic emergencies, curated and approved for residency training by the AIR Series Board. More specifically in this module, we identified 0 AIRs and 6 Honorable Mentions. We recommend programs give 2 hours (about 20 minutes per article) of III credit for this module. As of June 2017, the AIR series is now being used by over 125 residency programs with over 1,200 residents completing at least one module in the 2016-2017 academic year.
Nothing says “emergency” like a bite from a venomous reptile. If you work in an area populated by snakes, which covers most of the United States and the world, then chances are good that you will see a patient with a snake bite in the Emergency Department (ED). The severity of the symptoms and the treatment vary greatly with different snakes. In this post, we will outline the ED approach to and management of common U.S. snake envenomation.
Several years ago I created a resource for my ED rotation that I share with pharmacy students, pharmacy residents, and EM physician residents. It contains most of the guidelines and position statements on EM drug therapy that I utilize most often and is updated as new iterations are published. We’d like to share this tool with you to be used/modified to meet your rotation needs.
Last updated: February 22, 2018
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The first recording from Little Patients, Big Medicine: the Pediatric Emergency Medicine (PEM) Podcast. This is an exciting interview with Dr. Halden Scott, a PEM physician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, about the use of lactate measurement in pediatric sepsis. Dr. Scott is one of the premier pediatric sepsis researchers, with a specific focus on the use of lactate measurement in the ED. We talk about the Sepsis-3 definitions and whether pediatrics will eventually follow them, Dr. Scott’s previous work on lactate use in the pediatric ED, and her new article published in March of 2017 on the association between elevated lactate in the ED and 30-day mortality in children. 1–6
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The volume of women presenting to the emergency department (ED) with newly diagnosed first-trimester pregnancies and suspected ectopic pregnancies sometimes seems like an infinitely growing number. As ED physicians, proper identification of an intrauterine pregnancy (IUP) in these patients is of paramount importance and the initial imaging test of choice for many has become bedside point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS).
When a patient is started on anticoagulant therapy, the purpose is to prevent clot formation or propagation. Anticoagulants can improve morbidity and mortality by maintaining cardiac stent patency, reducing the propagation of pulmonary emboli, or preventing formation of intra-cardiac thrombi.1,2 Unfortunately even after minor trauma, these medications can cause major problems. When a patient on clopidogrel is in a motor vehicle collision (MVC) or an elderly patient on warfarin falls out of their bed, the once life-improving therapy becomes potentially life-threatening. It is important for emergency care providers to maintain a high index of suspicion for life-threatening bleeds in all patients on anticoagulation following even minor injuries. The purpose of this discussion is to look beyond the intracranial hemorrhages (ICH) and to consider 5 other sources of bleeding that can occur in anticoagulated patients.