Articles: emergency-services.
-
To compare formal nurse triage with an informal prioritisation process for waiting times and patient satisfaction. ⋯ This study fails to show the benefits claimed for formal nurse triage. Nurse triage may impose additional delay for patient treatment, particularly among patients needing the most urgent attention.
-
To develop decision rules that will predict fractures in patients with ankle injuries, thereby assisting clinicians in being more selective in their use of radiography. ⋯ Highly sensitive decision rules have been developed and will now be validated; these may permit clinicians to confidently reduce the number of radiographs ordered in patients with ankle injuries.
-
Pediatric emergency care · Apr 1992
The Hawaii EMS-C project data: I. Reducing pediatric emergency morbidity and mortality; II. Statewide pediatric emergency registry to monitor morbidity and morality.
During a 12-month period ending on 11/30/88, data were collected on 16,010 pediatric patients who visited a pediatric emergency department (ED). These ED patients prospectively fell into one of the target areas for further study, including wheezing (15%), trauma (excluding burns; 29%), burns (1%), water-related injuries (1%), ingestions and toxic substance exposures (2%), child abuse (3%), handicapping conditions (5%), preventable incidents (33%), and ambulance arrivals (7%). Handicapped patients were more likely to require an ambulance. ⋯ Primary care physicians could be identified in 77% of the cohort. Large-scale interventions to reduce preventable pediatric morbidity and mortality have suffered from difficulties in documenting their effect in a population-based sample. A statewide pediatric emergency encounter registry is proposed.