Articles: emergency-services.
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Pediatric emergency care · Sep 2011
Multicenter Study Comparative StudyH1N1 hemagglutinin-inhibition seroprevalence in Emergency Department Health Care workers after the first wave of the 2009 influenza pandemic.
The 2009 H1N1 pandemic (H1N1pdm) virus has been associated with high rates of asymptomatic infections. Existing influenza infection control policies do not address potential transmission through exposure to asymptomatic infected individuals in health care settings. We conducted a seroprevalence study of H1N1pdm infection to determine whether health care workers (HCWs) in the emergency department showed increased evidence of infection during the first wave of the pandemic than that previously reported in adults in the community. ⋯ The higher serodetection rates in adults observed in the current study suggest potentially significantly more frequent infections in HCWs than in the general population. Further investigations are needed to ascertain the relative incidence of influenza infections in HCWs and non-HCWs, to study influenza transmission by asymptomatic infected subjects and ascertain the burden of such transmission in health care settings.
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Little information is available concerning the ability of prehospital triage scores to predict endpoints other than mortality. ⋯ Prehospital triage scores were predictors of Injury Severity Score >15, prolonged ICU stay, and massive hemorrhage but not of emergency procedure requirement.
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Multicenter Study
Emergency head injury imaging: implementing NICE 2007 in a tertiary neurosciences centre and a busy district general hospital.
Head injuries are a common emergency department (ED) presentation. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) updated its guidance in September 2007 regarding imaging required for patients with head injuries. ⋯ The SRFT implementation strategy employed was successful for adults, with the overall trend to increased clinical compliance post-guideline introduction. Evidence of a reluctance to adhere to the NICE recommendations for children indicated for CT head scan after a head injury was observed.
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The primary study aim was to examine the variations in crowding when an emergency department (ED) initiates ambulance diversion. ⋯ There was marked variation in ED workload rates and whether or not ambulance diversion occurred during a 24-hour period. This variability in initiating ambulance diversion suggests different or inconsistently applied decision-making criteria for initiating diversion.
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Multicenter Study
Revised trauma scoring system to predict in-hospital mortality in the emergency department: Glasgow Coma Scale, Age, and Systolic Blood Pressure score.
Our aim in this study was to assess whether the new Glasgow Coma Scale, Age, and Systolic Blood Pressure (GAP) scoring system, which is a modification of the Mechanism, Glasgow Coma Scale, Age, and Arterial Pressure (MGAP) scoring system, better predicts in-hospital mortality and can be applied more easily than previous trauma scores among trauma patients in the emergency department (ED). ⋯ The GAP scoring system can predict in-hospital mortality more accurately than the previously developed trauma scoring systems.