Michael Blaivas, MD, RDMS, professor of emergency medicine in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Northside Hospital Forsyth in Cumming, GA, says he has reviewed multiple cases involving consultants refusing to come to the ED, with a bad outcome resulting. "Mostly, this means an unhappy patient, but in critically ill ones can mean a lawsuit," he says.
This issue of Emergency Medicine Reports is the first in a two-part series on imaging and evaluation of stroke and transient ischemic attack (TIA). This part will review risk factors, history and physical examination, and computed tomography imaging. Part 2 will review magnetic resonance imaging, duplex ultrasound imaging, and treatment.
Critical hypoxemia in acute respiratory failure may be defined as a degree of impairment in tissue oxygenation that in and of itself, and separately from the primary cause of the respiratory failure threatens the life of the patient.
A recent examination of the Medicare database illustrates that survival rates after in-hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) remained unchanged from 1992 to 2005.
In a prior study, investigators at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center linked intraoperative contamination of patients' IV stopcocks with an increase in patient mortality.
