Delivering excellent End of Life Care in the Emergency Care is a real challenge but also a huge privilege and has formed some of the most rewarding parts of our careers to date.

We've been really keen to End of Life Care as a topic for a while now. Many, if not all of you, will have been out to these patients or received them in your ED. 

They aren’t simple cases to manage, with lots of issues around scope of practice, lack of alternative care pathways, confusion surrounding legal documentation and many studies have identified a lack of education around palliative care.

In this episode we’ll do our best to demystify those medico-legal terms, talk about care pathways and options that may be available to us, have a think about how we can talk with patients about death and then go on to discuss the clinical care we might need to deliver and the wider holistic nature of caring for these patients and their loved ones.

We're lucky enough to be joined by Ed Presswood, who's a palliative care consultant and clearly an expert on the topic. We gained a massive amount from this episode and we hope you find it really useful too.

You'll find the hyperlinks to some fantastic resources on the topic over on the webpage at TheResusRoom.

Once again we'd love to hear any comments or questions either via the website or social media.

Enjoy!

Simon, Rob & James

Welcome back to the podcast, coming to you all the way from Australia!

Rob and James were fortunate enough to be invited to deliver the keynote and an airway masterclass at this year's Australian College of Paramedicine International Conference.

At what was an amazing meeting, they were lucky enough to be able to catch up with some of the fantastic speakers to hear the key parts of their talks. In this episode you'll hear from;

Richard Armour, Mobile Intensive Care Ambulance Paramedic at Ambulance Victoria and PhD Candidate at Monash University; Identifying patients requiring chest compressions at overdose prevention sites

Nick Roder, MICA Flight Paramedic Educator, Ambulance Victoria and Teaching Associate, Monash University; Intubation in the setting of airways and inhalation burns

Dr Tegwyn McManamny, Intensive Care Paramedic and Lead Patient Review Specialist, Ambulance Victoria; Care of the Older Person - Delirium and Paramedic Detective

Olivia Hedges, Palliative Care Connect Lead, Ambulance Victoria; Palliative Care Connect Program

Chelsea Lanos, Advanced Care & Community Paramedic Researcher; Organ donation after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in Canada - a potential role for paramedics

A huge thanks to ACP for the invite, Zoll for the support of the podcast and conference and to the fantastic speakers for giving ip their time to talk to us. We'll be back with another Roadside to Resus episode for you next week on End of Life Care.

Once again we’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback either on the website or via twitter @TheResusRoom and we'll see you back in September!

Rob & James

Welcome back to the podcast!

We're back with three really interesting papers after our summer break, with some great points to think about with regards to our practice and patient outcomes.

First up we take a look at the CT FIRST study which looks at the benefit of whole body CT in patients presenting with a ROSC after their out of hospital cardiac arrest with no obvious cause. Should we be more liberal in our imaging requests in this patient cohort?

Next up we have a think about thrombolysis for massive PEs. When it comes to these patients we have to consider the very real potential complications of thrombolysis and that can often dissuade us from treating them. This paper looks at an alternative dose in thrombolysis and describes some really interesting results.

Finally we take a look at a CT study which is scanning trauma patients after they have died. What injury patterns do they find, which injuries would have been amenable to treatment and are there any lessons on practice to be learnt?

Once again we’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback either on the website or via twitter @TheResusRoom and we'll see you back in September!

Simon & Rob