So this month we’re looking at major incidents and specifically the triage process that is now coming into play in the UK and further afield that you need to know about!
We normally stick pretty strongly to clinical topics; they’re pretty easy to focus on because you can imagine how extra knowledge in a certain clinical area could make a difference to presentations that we see pretty commonly. And being brutally honest, making the effort to prepare and rehearse what we might do, on the off chance that we ever come across a major incident, can be difficult to motivate yourself to do.
But this is probably an area that investing a bit of time in, really thinking about how you would act in a major incident, could make a phenomenal difference to what may be one of the most, if not the most challenging clinical days of your career.
In the episode we run through Ten Second Triage (TST) and the Major Incident Triage Tool (MITT). They replace the previous triage methodologies and are to be implemented by the end of this month. We also cover some other aspects of planning and approach for being the first responder at a major incident, and we were lucky enough to gain some insights to the new triage process from Phil Cowburn, an EM & PHEM consultant who was involved in their development.
Once again we’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback either on the website or via X @TheResusRoom!
Simon, Rob & James
Welcome back to June's Papers of the month!
We kick off this month looking at the work up of patients with a first episode of psychosis. With these patients there is a chance of a psychosis secondary to an underlying structural cause. Getting neuro-imaging to look for this prior to psychiatric assessment is tricky though, often with a need for sedation and then the subsequent delay for psychiatric assessment. Our first paper looks at the yield of positive scans for these patients and helps us to understand a bit more about the need for this.
Secondly; sepsis screening tools are commonplace in most emergency services and departments, but how do they compare against senior clinician gestalt?
Finally we look at the association of gastric distension in cardiac arrest and the rates of ROSC, should we be concentrating more on decompression of gastric volume intra-arrest?
Once again we’d love to hear any thoughts or feedback either on the website or via X @TheResusRoom!
Simon & Rob