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Restraint use, like other disparities in healthcare, can stem from the impact of racial bias in clinical encounters. A disparity, according to the Institute of Medicine in its Unequal Report, is a difference in the quality of healthcare provided to patients that is not attributable to the…
Restraints serve as a means to manage agitation and other behavioral disorders when attempts at de-escalation fail. National trends show a 50% increase in the number of ED visits for behavioral disorders from 2006 to 2011 (Capp et al., 2016). EDs in the United States see nearly 1.7 million agitated…
Today, emergency room physicians see too many patients who have delayed treatment for heart attacks, strokes, and other serious conditions because of COVID-19 fears. In some cases, the results are needlessly catastrophic.
Just like NASA’s mission control analyzes data and provides feedback to optimize a mission in space, a hospital command center does the same for the nurses and clinicians caring for patients on the wards.1 In the past, “incident command centers” were established to temporarily assist health…
In the past month, the George Washington University Emergency Medicine group has established a COVID-19 Emergency Medicine Strike Team(5). In collaboration with the DC Department of Health (DOH) and the GW Medical Faculty Associates, the EMED Strike Team has established three different mechanisms…
Imagine receiving a phone call or email notifying you that your most personal information such as your medical history, medications, social security number and much more has been stolen. Now imagine you are only one of 79 million people who received this notification. This scenario is not…
Firearm violence is a topic that is all too familiar to clinicians who work in the emergency department. In the urban settings in which gunshot wounds are commonplace, they are merely a blip on the radar of inner-city violence. Though interpersonal violence is often dismissed as inevitable among…
With one line of code “RTS42256H_EPTEST_FIBRILLATION_ON_1.0,” the Vice President of the United States began to feel crushing chest pain and difficulty breathing. His defibrillator, designed to save his life was doing exactly the opposite.
“Currently, we control your hospital. We own your servers. We own your systems. We own your patients’ medical records. To regain access to your medical records you need an encryption key...which only we have,” reads the hospital staff of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital(1). In a pop culture nod, a mid-…
Seventy-nine percent of suicides occur in developing countries and hanging is the second most likely method of suicide attempt in developing countries1,2. Efforts to prevent hanging are hindered by the social stigma of depression and suicide and the lack of an effective prevention strategy. In this…