Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
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A short-cut review was carried out to establish whether abdominal pain on hopping/jumping can assist in the initial diagnosis of appendicitis in children. Four studies were directly relevant to the question. The author, date and country of publication, patient group studied, study type, relevant outcomes, results and study weaknesses of these papers are tabulated. The clinical bottom line is that the presence of abdominal pain when asked to hop seems to be both reasonably sensitive and specific to a diagnosis of appendicitis in children.
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Severe neonatal hypothermia is an infrequent presentation to the Emergency Department. This case report describes the successful resuscitation and rapid rewarming of a newborn baby who presented to the Emergency Department with a core temperature of 14.8°C. This is the lowest temperature documented in the literature to date from which an infant has been successfully resuscitated.
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To develop and validate models to predict emergency department (ED) presentations and hospital admissions for time and day of the year. ⋯ Valid ED prediction tools can be generated from access to de-identified historic data, which may be used to assist elective surgery scheduling and bed management. The paper provides forecasting performance levels to guide similar studies.
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Emergency doctors must make decisions for many patients in a limited time. Various emergency cases are not compatible with routine conditions as described in textbooks, so doctors use clinical decision making (CDM) processes to act in the best possible way. In the present work, these processes and some of the related factors were assessed. ⋯ The rule-based process is the most common CDM process used by emergency doctors, perhaps because of the minimisation of human error in this process. CDM choice may be influenced by triage level, treatment room and doctors' educational levels. Revealing and studying these factors may help shift decisions to the best possible decision making levels, defining a model in future research.
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To determine whether there are prehospital differences between blacks and whites experiencing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and to ascertain which factors are responsible for any such differences. ⋯ Blacks were less likely to experience a return of spontaneous circulation than whites, less likely to receive defibrillation or cardiopulmonary resuscitation from EMS and more likely to receive medications from EMS. Differences in underlying health, care prior to the arrival of EMS, and delays in the notification of EMS personnel may contribute to racial disparities in prehospital survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.