SGEM Xtra: SEMAC IX
Date: October 15th, 2017 I had the privilege to present a plenary talk at the Saskatchewan Emergency Medicine Annual Conference (SEMAC). It was held in the majestic Delta Hotel in Saskatoon. Thank you to Dr. James Stempien, Dr. Paul Olszynski and the organizing committee for inviting me and showing me such hospitality. The plenary talk was entitled Going On-Line to Meet your Continuing Medical Education (CME) Needs. It tried to answer why we need to go on-line and how to go on-line. Why we go on-line to meet our CME needs is because there is a knowledge translation problem. It can take over ten years for high-quality, clinically relevant information to reach the patients bedside. This is far too long in the age of social media and we want patients to get the best care based on the best evidence. Ultimately we want...
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SGEM#191: No Time for Physio – Roll With It
Podcast Link: SGEM191 Date: October 5th, 2017 Reference: Brison et al. Effect of early supervised physiotherapy on recovery from acute ankle sprain: randomised controlled trial. BMJ Nov 2016. Guest Skeptic: Dr. Steve Joseph. Steve completed his Sport Medicine fellowship training with the Fowler Kennedy Sport Medicine Clinic in 2017. He served with the Canadian Forces as a Medical Officer and Flight Surgeon. Steve is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at Western University working at the Fowler Clinic and the Roth McFarlane Hand and Upper Limb Centre. Case: A 43-year-old male presents to your local rural emergency department Monday morning after rolling his ankle during his usual weekend pickup basketball game. He is Ottawa Ankle Rule positive but the x-ray shows no fracture. Background: We have covered the Ottawa Ankle Rules (tools) early in Season#1 (SGEM#3). The...
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SGEM#190: Wee are the Champions of Pediatric Urine Samples
Podcast Link: SGEM190 Date: September 26th, 2017 Reference: Kaufman, et al. Faster clean catch urine collection (Quick-Wee method) from infants: randomised controlled trial. BMJ April 17. Guest Skeptic: Dr. Natalie May trained as an emergency physician with subspecialty paediatric emergency medicine in the UK and worked in Manchester and Oxford before moving to Australia in 2015 to work for Sydney HEMS. She’s been there for the last 18 months working in prehospital and retrieval medicine and then in Emergency Medicine. She is a medical education enthusiast and has been an editor and regular contributor to the St. Emlyn’s blog and podcast since 2012. We appeared on stage at SMACC Chicago doing a parody of Jimmy Fallon’s Tight Pants skit. Case: You are working the afternoon shift in the paediatric emergency department. It has been the usual busy after-school, after-work time. Your shift is...
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SGEM Xtra: CALS Conference on Rural Emergency Care
Date: Sept 30th, 2017 I had the pleasure of presenting at the CALS Conference on Rural Emergency Care held in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota yesterday. Thank you to Dr. Todd Grant and the conference committee for inviting me. Everyone made me feel very welcome. The keynote address was called Looking Back/Looking Ahead. I was asked to look back over my career providing rural emergency care and look ahead to the future of rural emergency care. There were five objectives to the presentation: 1) Define Evidence Based Medicine (EBM): “The conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.” (David Sackett et al BMJ 1996). The evidence based medicine triad can be illustrated in a Venn diagram. EBM encourages the health care professionals to use their clinical judgment. It also includes the patients values and preferences. The third part of the...
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SGEM#189: Bring Me To Life in OHCA
Podcast Link: SGEM189 Date: September 19th, 2017 Reference: Cournoyer et al. Prehospital advanced cardiac life support for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: a cohort study. Academic Emergency Medicine. September 2017. Guest Skeptic: Dr. Corey Heitz is an emergency physician in Roanoke, Virginia. He is also the CME editor for Academic Emergency Medicine and the associate editor for emergency medicine simulation at the AAEM MedEdPORTAL. Case: You are the medical director of an EMS system in a large city deciding on whether to respond to all out of hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) with ACLS capabilities, or if resources should be directed to those candidates for extracorporeal CPR. Background: There are about ½ million sudden cardiac arrests in the USA each year. About half of these cardiac arrests are OHCA and the survival rate is pretty poor. We have covered the topic of OHCA on the SGEM...
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