Articles: emergency-services.
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The undergraduate medical curriculum does not include supervised training in emergency services. Medical students and residents are expected to acquire skills and experience related to emergency medicine during their clerkships in the clinical wards. Consequently, Israeli medical graduates often have difficulty in coping with common situations in primary care and emergency medicine. ⋯ Both the positive feedback of the trainees and the practical relevance of the program and its feasibility, suggest that it may be a worthwhile addition to the undergraduate and graduate clinical curriculum. However, we have no data for evaluating the outcome. We feel that all aspects of emergency medicine should be included in the teaching programs of the various clinical specialties, and suggest that the emergency room should be used as a teaching setting during the clinical clerkship, the internship and residency training.
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Of 408 patients presenting to a coronary care unit over a six month period 237 had an acute myocardial infarction. Two-thirds presented to hospital within three hours of the onset of symptoms. ⋯ In-hospital transfer delay has increased considerably since 1972. It did not exclude many patients from receiving thrombolysis but it caused delayed thrombolysis.
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We report on the outcome of major trauma patients brought to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital in 1989 and compare it with 1987. There is an improvement which followed changes in the management of serious injuries.
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A hospital's emergency physician billing procedures and fee schedules may not have kept pace with changes in the make-up of emergency room personnel. Revisions require thorough analysis of coding procedures, payer and patient data, Medicare rates, and breakdowns of collections. A successful analysis may yield improved collections, increased physician compensation, and separate billing by emergency physicians.
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Multicenter Study Clinical Trial
Impact of the availability of a prior electrocardiogram on the triage of the patient with acute chest pain.
To determine whether information from a prior electrocardiogram (ECG) improves diagnostic accuracy in the emergency department (ED) evaluation of patients with acute chest pain. ⋯ When the current ECG is consistent with ischemia or infarction, the availability of a prior ECG for comparison to determine whether the ECG changes are old or new improves diagnostic accuracy and triage decisions by reducing the admission of patients without AMI or acute ischemic heart disease (increased specificity) without reducing the admission of patients with these diagnoses (unchanged sensitivity).