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Under pressure: does cricoid improve laryngoscopy?
Whether or not we should use cricoid during emergency intubation is fast becoming one of the greatest modern controversies in Emergency Medicine. While we await data from randomised controlled trials, in this month’s issue Caruana et al have provided some important new evidence. In a retrospective analysis of 1195 patients undergoing pre-hospital intubation, cricoid pressure was not found to be associated with difficult laryngoscopy. After propensity score matching, there were no apparent differences in the incidence of complications with or without the use of cricoid pressure, other than an increase in the proportion of patients sustaining airway trauma when cricoid pressure was used. Ultimately we now have further reason to question the routine use of cricoid pressure, but is it sufficient to change your practice?
Statistics made much easier!
Reading the phrase ‘propensity score matching’ may have just made you feel a little uncomfortable. If so, you’re not alone. Most emergency physicians could do with a little help when it comes to interpreting some of the more complicated statistical analyses we encounter in the literature. If you feel that way, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to see that this month we have the first in an occasional series of articles on statistical concepts that go beyond the basics. These articles aim to provide a helpful tutorial to readers to increase their skills of critical appraisal for the future. To help illustrate the concepts, we will link them to original articles that we publish. This month, we’ve linked to the work by Caruana et al, which is free to access as the editor’s choice.
Who calls ambulances and doesn’t wait?
Most of us can appreciate that calling for an emergency ambulance is not to be taken lightly. When emergency services are facing severe and increasing pressure, it can be extremely frustrating to observe that some patients arrive in the Emergency Department by ambulance but don’t wait to be seen. In this issue, Doupe et al explore the characteristics of patients who do just that. Compared with other patients, they found that patients who called an ambulance and did not wait were more likely to have a history of substance abuse ad to live in low income areas. Identifying the characteristics of patients who exhibit this behaviour will help emergency physicians to create individual management plans to deal with apparently unhelpful patterns of seeking healthcare.
A new device to help metrics for ED weighting
Rapidly and accurately estimating the weight of children presenting to the Paediatric Emergency Department is highly important for drug dosing but often challenging. Emergency physicians commonly use formulae or aids such as the Broselow tape. This month, Jung et al report on the accuracy of a novel ‘rolling tape’ electronic device with wireless transmission. They demonstrate that its use enabled faster and more accurate weight estimation than the Broselow tape. However, they go further still: using the rolling tape led to faster orders for resuscitation drugs and defibrillation in cardiac arrest. Could this revolutionise how we measure patients’ weight in the Paediatric Emergency Department?
The trajectory of an academic emergency physician
If you’re a research active emergency physician, you may be interested in tracking your academic progress in relation to other emergency physicians. Is your progress fast or slow? In this issue, Miro et al explore whether we can develop a guide to the progress of researchers in Emergency Medicine. They tracked the h-index of a selected group of academic emergency physicians. The h-index tries to combine an author’s impact with their productivity. If an author has, for example, 5 articles that have been cited 5 times or more, then their h-index is 5. Miro et al have derived a formula to track the rise in h-index for ‘fast’, ‘medium’ and ‘slow’ growth academics. Where do you fit in? Don’t be discouraged, though. All the authors included in this sample were highly reputable academic emergency physicians. Even those in the ‘slow growth’ category may therefore be elite researchers. You may, however, find that this article spurs you on!
Can doctors measure pain in children?
Brudvik et al report a fascinating study in which they asked children to score their pain in the Paediatric Emergency Department, while doctors and parents were asked to estimate the score. How do you think we did? Read the full article to find out the detail, but you may be surprised to find out how much we under-estimate pain and how often we withhold analgesia, even for children with severe pain. It’s a sobering reminder that the pain of an individual is a very personal experience and cannot be accurately measured by others.