In this February issue

The idea of open access publishing is not new and has been adopted by many journals in recent years. This journal offers authors an open access option called OnlineOpen that lets authors have their article immediately freely available to everyone, including those who don't subscribe to the journal. To cover the cost of publishing OnlineOpen, authors pay an article publication charge. There are several benefits for authors to offer access to their manuscripts in this way, including the ability to post the final, published PDF of their article on a website, institutional repository, or other free public server and will be automatically submitted to PubMed Central and its mirror sites. Open data is a different and newer concept that is developing significant momentum and is being adopted by governments as well as academia. We publish an editorial that describes what open data means and why it is important. Simulation is a fundamental component of clinical education and assessments of competency. It has several roles in emergency medicine: improving team performance, identifying and mitigating threats to patient safety and improving systems and infrastructure. A group from Toronto, Canada describes the use of in-situ simulation and implementation and mitigation strategies for ED-specific challenges The stethoscope is an almost redundant piece of medical equipment, arguably being a better badge of identity draped around someone's neck than it is a reliable diagnostic tool. If you still have one, have you ever asked yourself how clean it is? We publish a letter reporting a simple study answering this question. The authors found that stethoscope cleaning practices were sub-optimal and an educational intervention resulted in a modest improvement. Future interventions might include bedside reminders about cleaning stethoscopes, better access to cleaning equipment and cycles of observation and feedback to promote cultural change. As with long sleeved shirts and ties, cross infection is a problem and must be avoided. The transition from being a trainee in emergency medicine to becoming a specialist emergency physician is a challenging rite of passage in career progression, as daunting as the transition from medical student to a newly qualified doctor. Most people (but sadly, not all) go through this process with the insight to know that passing a fellowship exam is not the end of their professional development and they still have a lot to learn. The Trainee Focus section explores this period of a doctor's career in some detail, complementing a day-long workshop held at the College's annual scientific meeting last November in New Zealand. Ketamine continues to draw debate about its role in pre-hospital and emergency department use. This journal regularly receives manuscripts that report audits of its use, not all of which survive the peer review process. We publish one in this issue auditing it use by the Australian Capital Territories ambulance service. Can a predictive rule safely reduce the number of negative blood cultures collected in an Australian ED? According to researchers from New South Wales the answer is yes – with a caveat. Their predictive rule has a high sensitivity (98.8%) and modest specificity (48.7%), and if applied stringently would have prevented almost half of all blood cultures in their ED and missed two positives. The first pass success (FPS) rate is a commonly used marker of endotracheal intubation proficiency. We publish a systematic review and meta-analysis, from researchers at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland that quantifies emergency department FPS rates and summarizes the rates of adverse events associated with endotracheal intubation. This is a significant and comprehensive review that must surely represent the best available published data to benchmark emergency airway performance. Hypoxia is a recognized complication of procedural sedation. A study completed in New South Wales demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in hypoxia when high flow oxygen is given via non-rebreathing masks during emergency procedural sedation. This intervention is simple, safe and inexpensive, and the authors argue that its use be evaluated further in prospective trials.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.