If you are relying solely on the Hendrich Fall Risk Model to identify patients at high risk for falls in your ED, you might be overlooking patients at risk.
When patients are held in the ED for hours waiting for an inpatient bed, you need to give medications normally not used in the ED, at regular intervals, and be certain that floor nurses know what was given and when. Is this the "perfect storm" for errors?
Your ED might have a well-rehearsed, comprehensive disaster plan, but it might be missing one important element: How are you going to address the unique needs of children who will quickly flood your ED during a mass casualty?
An ED physician at Brackenridge Hospital in Austin, TX, was about to give a triptan to a 42-year-old woman with a severe headache and a history of migraines.
ED nurses were confronted with H1N1 in the spring and probably will face it again this fall.
Emergency medicine physicians routinely deal with cardiac emergencies in adult patients but rarely encounter infants with critical cardiac conditions. While the infant's cardiac physiology can be very different from an adult's, the general principles of preload, afterload, contractility, and vascular resistance are the same.
