Articles: emergency-department.
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Editorial Historical Article
How can emergency physicians harness the power of new technologies in clinical practice and education?
As the Royal College of Emergency Medicine looks back on 50 years of progress towards the future it is clear that new and emerging technologies have the potential to substantially change the practice of emergency medicine. Education, diagnostics, therapeutics are all likely to change as algorithms, personalised medicine and insights into complexity become more readily available to the emergency clinician. This paper outlines areas of our practice that are already changing and speculates on how we might need to prepare our workforce for a technologically enhanced future.
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Editorial Multicenter Study
Managing alcohol-related attendances in emergency care: can diversion to bespoke services lessen the burden?
Acute alcohol intoxication (AAI) has a long history of burdening emergency care services. Healthcare systems around the world have explored a variety of different services that divert AAI away from EDs to better manage their condition. ⋯ In this article, we outline a brief history of diversionary services, introduce the concept of Alcohol Intoxication Management Services (AIMS) and describe examples of AIMS in the UK. We then describe Evaluating the Diversion of Alcohol-Related Attendances, a natural experiment including six cities with AIMS compared with six cities without, that involves an ethnographic study, records patient experiences in both AIMS and EDs, assesses impact on key performance indicators in healthcare and evaluates the cost-effectiveness of AIMS.