EMTs Disarm Psychiatric Patient Going For Cop Gun

From CBS New York:

Two emergency medical technicians have disarmed a psychiatric patient who tried to grab a police officer’s gun in a Bronx hospital emergency room.

The New York Post reports that authorities say the man was stopped as he struggled with the officer and two emergency medical technicians who jumped to the rescue.

“Skin Printer” Generates Skin to Cover Injuries

From Neatorama:

The system, which lays down cells with the same fluid-based inkjet technology used in many printers, could print large swathes of living tissue directly onto the injuries of soldiers wounded on the battlefield. Covering burns and related wounds is of critical importance because, the scientists note, “any loss of full-thickness skin of more than 4 cm in diameter will not heal by itself.”

Tests on mice revealed advanced healing by both the second and third week of recovery, with complete closure and formation of scar tissue by week three in treated (but not untreated) subjects. The printer has two heads, one of which ejects skin cells mixed with fibrinogen (a blood coagulant) and type I collagen (the main component of the connective tissue in scars). The other head ejects thrombin (another coagulant).

Illinois Hospital Report Card

From the Illinois Department of Public Health:

The Illinois Department of Public Health has released its newest information for the Hospital Report Card and added new information, including emergency room visits and pediatric information.

“To help Illinoisians make better decisions about their choice of hospital or health care provider, they need information about the quality of care offered by these facilities,” IDPH Director Dr. Damon T. Arnold stated. “The Hospital Report Card and Consumer Guide to Health Care Web site allows consumers to find average costs for specific medical procedures, nurse staffing levels at hospitals and general quality of care information.”

ABC 4 questions strategy to stop Utah’s exploding addiction to RX drugs

From ABC4:

An ABC 4 taking action investigation is exposing the strategy lawmakers are using to fight Utah’s growing addiction to prescription medications.

This week ABC 4′s Noah Bond uncovered how easy it is for an addict to feed a habit. All he or she has to do is walk into an emergency room and lie about a symptom.

Braid: Too bad ER wait victims are not ducks

From the Calgary Herald:

Beyond saying “nobody wants to wait in an emergency room” — Stelmach’s trite observation — the Tories express no empathy, voice no anger, call nobody to account.

When the victims are ducks, though, the premier doesn’t tell anybody to cool down. He’s pretty hot himself.

The duck deaths are “sad and disappointing,” he said, especially when Syncrude was fined for earlier deaths only a few days before. “And now we have this other incident, which is not only frustrating, you know; it makes one angry.”

Iowa hospital sees drop in alcohol emergencies

From the Chicago Tribune:

An emergency room doctor says he believes Iowa City’s 21-and-older bar age is behind a drop in alcohol-related ER visits by young people to University Hospitals.

The Gazette says Dr. Michael Takacs found ER visits by young adults age 18 to 22 decreased 25 percent when comparing a four-month period in 2009 to the same period this year.

Cops: Flemington woman stole iPad in Hunterdon Hospital’s ER

From NJ:

A Flemington woman has been charged with theft for allegedly taking an unattended iPad from the waiting room at Hunterdon Medical Center’s emergency room Monday, police said today.

Jessica L. Andrews, 23, told police she was planning to turn the device over to authorities.

Ten uses for your body after you die

From CNN:

5. Leave your body to “the body farm”

Did you ever wonder how, on TV shows, detectives know the time of death just by examining the body? Cops can thank the folks at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center for helping them figure it out. “The body farm,” as it’s known, has “650 skeletons and growing” scattered over 2.5 acres in Knoxville, according to its website. Researchers and students study bodies in varying stages of decay to help anthropologists and law enforcement officials answer important questions, such as body identification and time of death analysis. (For a fascinating account of a visit to the center, see Mary Roach’s book “Stiff.”)

 

Can emergency department nurses performing triage predict the need for admission?

From the Emergency Medicine Journal:

Objective To investigate whether nurses performing triage are able to predict the need for admission of patients attending the emergency department (ED) with sufficient accuracy to facilitate hospital bed management.

Methods A prospective observational study was performed in which nurses performing triage, in a large urban UK hospital, were asked to predict whether patients would ultimately be admitted or discharged from the ED.

Results 3144 patients attended the ED during the trial period, of which 296 were excluded from the study. The positive predictive value of the nurse performing triage’s prediction for the whole study cohort was 54.23.

Conclusion Predicting admission at triage is not sufficiently accurate to inform hospital in-patient bed management systems. The decision to admit can only be determined after a comprehensive clinical work up and patients cannot be accurately ‘signposted’ during the triage process.

Drug Seeking Behavior in ER Doubles, Feeds Growing Addiction to Pain Pills

From ABCNews:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of ER visits that involved non-medical use of narcotic pain medications more than doubled in the United States between 2004 and 2008.

“This is a huge issue for emergency departments because, unlike the office setting, the ED treatment of pain is frequently indicated without the benefit of an established doctor-patient relationship and often in an environment of limited resources,” said Dr. Jason Hoppe, assistant professor in the department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

According to Hoppe, prescription opioids are currently the number one cause of poisoning deaths in the country, surpassing cocaine and heroin as causes of drug associated death.