Pines JM, Hollander JE Emergency Department Crowding is Associated with Poor Care for Patients with Severe Pain
Refers to article:
Emergency Department Crowding Is Associated With Poor Care for Patients With Severe Pain
, 03 October 2007
Jesse M. Pines, Judd E. Hollander
Annals of Emergency Medicine
January 2008 (Vol. 51, Issue 1, Pages 1-5) Abstract |
Full Text |
Full-Text PDF (88 KB)
Editor’s Capsule Summary
What is already known on this topic
Emergency department (ED) crowding may result in delays in the administration of medication such as antibiotics for pneumonia.
What question this study addressed
Does crowding cause delays in treatment for pain?
What this study adds to our knowledge
In this retrospective analysis of 13,578 patients treated at a single inner-city ED, patients with severe pain were slightly less likely to receive pain medications quickly when the ED volume increased.
How this might change clinical practice
Crowding may delay the administration of pain medication in some patients. Standing orders for the administration of pain medication might mitigate such delays.
aVanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN
bUniversity of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
SEE RELATED ARTICLE, P. 1.
Editor’s Note: You are reading the first installment of Annals of Emergency Medicine Journal Club. This bi-monthly feature seeks to improve the critical appraisal skills of emergency physicians and other interested readers through a guided critique of actual Annals of Emergency Medicine articles. Each Journal Club will pose questions that encourage readers - be they clinicians, academics, residents, or medical students - to critically appraise the literature.
Over a two- to three-year cycle we plan to ask questions that cover the main topics in research methodology and critical appraisal of the literature. To do this we will select articles that use a variety of study designs and analytic techniques. These may or may not be the most clinically important articles in a specific issue but they are articles that serve the mission of covering the clinical epidemiology curriculum.
Journal Club entries will be published in two phases. In the first phase, a list of questions about the article will be published in the issue that the article appears. Questions are rated “novice,” () “intermediate,” () “advanced” (), so that individuals planning a journal club can assign the right question to the right student. The second phase consists of the publication of suggested answers. This will be done 5 months following the publication of the questions. However, residency directors will have immediate access to the answers through the Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors Share Point Web site. Thus, if an actual journal club is conducted within 5 months of the publication of the questions, no one will have access to the published answers except the residency director. The purpose of delaying the publication of the answers is to promote discussion and critical review of the literature by both residents and medical students and discourage regurgitation of the published answers.
It is our hope that the Journal Club will broaden Annals of Emergency Medicine’s appeal to residents and medical students. We are interested in receiving feedback about this feature. Please e-mail journalclub@acep.org with your comments.