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Shortness of breath. Rashes. Facial swelling. Fatigue. Itching. Hypotension. Dizziness. Confusion. Any one of these symptoms, and dozens of others, could be caused by an adverse drug event (ADE).
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The three most common drugs involved in ED visits for adverse drug events are insulin, warfarin, and amoxicillin, says a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Increasing numbers of children are coming to EDs with injuries from soccer, says a just-published study. From 1990 through 2003, there were an estimated 1.6 million soccer-related injuries that resulted in ED visits, ranging from 96,179 in 1990, to 118,963 injuries in 2003.
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After an elderly man told ED nurses he felt dizzy and weak, he handed them two boxes a cereal box that held medications he took every day, and an oatmeal box containing drugs his doctor told him to stop taking.
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Are there any patients being held in your ED's hallway right now? How would you like for those patients to go directly to an inpatient hallway instead? That's exactly the policy that the ED at Stony Brook (NY) University Medical Center has in place.
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If you suspect a patient is having an acute myocardial infarction (MI), that patient will receive an electrocardiogram and be evaluated with cardiac markers. Yet, there are no definitive diagnostic tests to determine if your patient has sepsis, which has mortality near that of acute MI.
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Identifying septic patients at triage can decrease the potential for development of organ dysfunction leading to severe sepsis and septic shock, says Christa Schorr, RN, BSN, the program manager responsible for data collection and analysis of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign database at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, NJ.
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If a patient complains of heart palpitation or chest pain, you might not immediately suspect caffeine abuse, but this could be a growing problem among young people, according to a recently published study. Researchers looked retrospectively at 265 caffeine abuse cases called into a regional poison control center over a three-year period, and they found that 12% ended up in an area ED.
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As a case manager, your job involves being an advocate for your patients as well as keeping your hospital's best interests in mind, and that means being informed about the business end of health care.
