Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
-
Randomized Controlled Trial
Randomized Trial of Therapy Dogs Versus Deliberative Coloring (Art Therapy) to Reduce Stress in Emergency Medicine Providers.
Cognitive stress during shift work contributes to burnout in emergency department (ED) workers. We hypothesize that if physicians and nurses interact with a therapy dog for 5 minutes while on ED shift, both their perceived and their manifested stress levels will decrease. ⋯ This randomized controlled clinical trial demonstrates preliminary evidence that a 5-minute therapy dog interaction while on shift can reduce provider stress in ED physicians and nurses.
-
In the era of frequent head-to-pelvis computed tomography (CT) for adult blunt trauma evaluation, we sought to update teachings regarding aortic injury by determining 1) the incidence of aortic injury; 2) the proportion of patients with isolated aortic injury (without other concomitant thoracic injury); 3) the clinical implications of aortic injury (hospital mortality, length of stay [LOS], and rate of surgical interventions); and 4) the screening value of traditional risk factors/markers (such as high-energy mechanism and widened mediastinum on chest x-ray [CXR]) for aortic injury, compared to newer criteria from the recently developed NEXUS Chest CT decision instrument (DI). ⋯ Aortic injury is rare in adult ED blunt trauma patients who survive to receive imaging. Most ED aortic injury patients have associated thoracic injuries and survive to hospital discharge. Widened mediastinum on CXR and high-energy mechanism have relatively low screening sensitivity for aortic injury, but the NEXUS Chest DI detected all cases.