Articles: emergency-services.
-
Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2023
ReviewReview article: Prehospital telehealth for emergency care: A scoping review.
Telehealth has been successfully implemented in the prehospital setting to expedite emergency care, although applications are still in their infancy. With recent advances in technologies, it is not described how prehospital telehealth has evolved over the past decade. This scoping review aimed to answer the research question 'what telehealth platforms have been used to facilitate communication between prehospital healthcare providers and emergency clinicians in the past decade?'. ⋯ Challenges to telehealth involved technical, clinical and organisational issues. Few facilitators of prehospital telehealth were identified. Telehealth platforms to facilitate prehospital to ED communication continue to develop but require technological advances and improved network connectivity to support implementation in the prehospital environment.
-
Appropriate decision-making is critical for transfusions to prevent unnecessary adverse outcomes; however, transfusion in the emergency department (ED) can only be decided based on sparse evidence in a limited time window. ⋯ In this single-center retrospective study, younger age and higher ED triage scores were associated with the appropriateness of RBC transfusions.
-
Emerg Med Australas · Aug 2023
24 hours - Life in the E.R.: A state-wide data linkage analysis of in-patients with prolonged emergency department length of stay in New South Wales, Australia.
Describe the characteristics and predictors of mortality for patients who spend more than 24 h in the ED waiting for an in-patient bed and compare baseline clinical and demographic characteristics between tertiary and non-tertiary hospitals. ⋯ Interventions and models of care to address ED access block need to focus on mental health patients, older patients particularly those with cardiorespiratory illness and oncology and haematology patients for whom risk of mortality is disproportionately higher.
-
Observational Study
Care complexity factors associated with revisits to an emergency department.
To analyze the prevalence of care complexity factors (CCFs) in patients coming to an emergency department (ED) and to analyze their relation to 30-day ED revisits. ⋯ The prevalence of CCFs is high in patients who seek ED care. Patients revisiting within 30 days of an episode have more CCFs. Early identification of such patients would help to stratify risk and develop preventive strategies to decrease the incidence of revisiting.
-
Although frequent emergency department (ED) users have been widely studied in cross-sectional settings, there is some evidence suggesting that most frequent ED users do not remain frequent users over multiple consecutive years. The objective of this study was to explore the association between persistent multiyear frequent ED use and individuals' characteristics. ⋯ Differences exist between persistent and non-persistent frequent ED users that should be considered when implementing interventions designed to improve health outcomes and curtail healthcare expenditures generated by the broad population of frequent ED users.