If you were faced with stab wound to the neck and had to act fast, would you have a well-thought out plan that you are comfortable with? In this EM Cases Best Case Ever podcast we discuss the do's and don'ts of penetrating upper airway injury awake intubation with airway expert George Kovacs....
As ED docs we’re particularly well suited to take a lead in disaster medicine. We own this. In this EM Cases podcast, with the help of Laurie Mazurik, Daniel Kollek and Joshua Bezanson we will help you become familiar with a general approach to mass casualties, how to handle critical infrastructure disruption in your ED, management of biohazards including airway management, chemical hazards including decontamination and finally evacuation principles in the case of a natural disaster...
In anticipation of EM Cases Main Episode 100 on Disaster Medicine with Laurie Mazurik, David Kollek and Joshua Bezanson, Dr. Mazurik tells of her experience as a disaster medicine leader with keeping health care workers safe during the SARS era. If you were faced with a patient with suspected Ebola or drug resistant TB or any other biohazard patient who required intubation, would you know how to handle the situation so that you and your colleagues were safe...
North York General Hospital's 30th Annual Emergency Medicine Update (EMU) Conference 2017 featured some of the best talks I've ever heard from the likes of Sara Gray, Amal Mattu, David Carr and many more. I had a hard time choosing which talks to feature on this EM Cases podcast. I settled on a potpourri of clinical topics and practice tips: Leeor Sommer on Lyme disease, Chris Hicks on signover, Matt Poyner on patient complaints and Walter Himmel on acute vestibular syndrome...
In this CritCases blog - a collaboration between STARS Air Ambulance Service, Mike Betzner and EM Cases, we take you through a not uncommon stroke presentation which then develops into a challenge with regard to management of elevated ICP, hypertension and the airway...
In this EM Cases podcast Dr. Joel Lockwood tells his Best Case Ever of a prehospital trauma resuscitation, bringing to light the challenges faced by EMS with the complicated trauma patient. He discusses the importance of checklists, practice and simulation to help streamline the process, offloading some cognitive burden, prepare the team, reduce the change of errors, improve efficiency and etch actions into each team member's muscle memory.
We discuss some quick, easy tips on how you can take your educating skills to the next level, from orienting the learner and establishing expectations at the start of the shift, to key questioning techniques to use in case presentations, to the lost art of active observation, to the One Minute Preceptor model, to giving effective end-of-shift feedback, medicine’s white whale. We end with a surprise appearance by another master educator who gives his top pearls on teaching on shift. This podcast is about how, on your next ED shift, you can make the most of every teachable moment...
In this part 2 of EM Cases Journal Jam podcast on Thrombolysis and Endovascular Therapy for Stroke Justin Morgenstern, Rory Spiegel and Anton Helman do a deep dive into the world's literature on endovascular therapy for stroke. While the evidence for endovascular therapy is stronger than that for IV systemic thrombolysis for stroke outcomes at 90 days, a closer look at the literature reveals that a very small minority of patients are eligible for endovascular therapy and we still don't know which patients benefit most from endovascular therapy...
In this two part EM Cases Journal Jam podcast Justin Morgenstern, Rory Spiegel and Anton Helman do a deep dive into the world's literature on systemic thrombolysis for ischemic stroke followed by an analysis of endovascular therapy for stroke. We elucidate the important issues related to p-values, ordinal analysis, fragility index, heterogeneity of studies, stopping trials early and conflicts of interest related to this body of evidence. While "calling a code stroke" is now considered standard for most stroke patients and tPA for stroke is considered a class 1A drug, a close look at the literature tells us that the evidence is not as strong as our stroke protocols suggest...
Sometimes our renal failure patients present short of breath with volume overload and we don't have immediate access to dialysis. What then? Dr. Mike Betzner, EM doc and medical director of STARS air ambulance service and collaborator on EM Cases CritCases blog tells his Best Case Ever and his approach to this challenging clinical situation. He offers two commonly used solutions: nitroglycerin and BiPAP as well as two not so common solutions: phlebotomy and rotating BP cuffs blown to above SBP...