Publications by authors named "Amy Hildreth"

Background: Emergency medicine (EM) physicians often practice in dynamic, high-stress, and uncertain settings with limited resources. Although simulation has been shown to enhance various aspects of student development, its impact on medical students' personal growth initiative, resourcefulness, and tolerance of uncertainty-crucial traits for managing future crises as emergency physicians-remain unclear. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to determine a high-fidelity prehospital simulation's impact on medical students' resourcefulness, personal growth, and tolerance of uncertainty.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Medics generally felt most confident in trauma, administrative, and airway skills, but expressed a greater need for training in infection, differential diagnosis, and neuro skills.
  • * In response to these training needs, two Tactical Medicine (TACMED) Divisions have been established to enhance the ongoing education of SOF medics using a bottom-up feedback approach.
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Objectives: Nonoperative management (NOM) of blunt splenic injury (BSI) is well accepted in appropriate patients. Splenic artery embolization (SAE) in higher-grade injuries likely plays an important role in increasing the success of NOM. We previously implemented a protocol requiring referral of all BSI grades III-V undergoing NOM for SAE.

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Background: Blunt traumatic abdominal wall hernias (TAWHs) are rare but require a variety of operative techniques to repair including bone anchor fixation (BAF) when tissue tears off bony structures. This study aimed to provide a descriptive analysis of BAF technique for blunt TAWH repair. Bone anchor fixation and no BAF repairs were compared, hypothesizing increased hernia recurrence with BAF repair.

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Introduction: Peer teachers have been found to be effective instructors during simulation-based education. However, there is a lack of research regarding their professional identity development throughout the course of the teaching activity. The purpose of this qualitative study, therefore, was to develop a framework to illustrate how peer teachers develop as educators during a prehospital simulation.

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Background: Blunt traumatic abdominal wall hernias (TAWH) occur in <1 % of trauma patients. Optimal repair techniques, such as mesh reinforcement, have not been studied in detail. We hypothesize that mesh use will be associated with increased surgical site infections (SSI) and not improve hernia recurrence.

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Background: Over the past decade, the use of technology-enhanced simulation in emergency medicine (EM) education has grown, yet we still lack a clear understanding of its effectiveness. This systematic review aims to identify and synthesize studies evaluating the comparative effectiveness of technology-enhanced simulation in EM.

Methods: We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, ERIC, Web of Science, and Scopus to identify EM simulation research that compares technology-enhanced simulation with other instructional modalities.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explored risk factors for recurrence of blunt traumatic abdominal wall hernias (TAWH) across 20 trauma centers, focusing on cases from 2012 to 2018.
  • Out of 175 patients with repaired TAWH, 21 (12.0%) experienced recurrences, with no significant differences in location, defect size, or time to repair between those who did and did not recur.
  • Key risk factors for recurrence included female sex, injury severity score (ISS), the need for emergency laparotomy (EL), and bowel resection, with bowel resection being particularly significant in further analysis.
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A recent EAST publication emphasized the importance of handoffs to ensure safe and effective care for trauma patients. In this work, we evaluated our existing handoffs from the operating room (OR) to the trauma intensive care unit (TICU) and implemented a formal process at our level 1 trauma center. Pre and post-intervention surveys were offered to the stakeholders.

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Background: The optimal tactical lighting for performing medical procedures under low-light conditions is unclear.

Methods: United States Navy medical personnel (N = 23) performed intravenous (IV) and intraosseous (IO) procedures on mannequins using a tactical headlamp, night vision goggles (NVGs), and night vision goggles with focusing adaptors (NVG+A) utilizing a randomized within-subjects design. Procedure success, time to completion, and user preferences were analyzed using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and nonparametric statistics at p < .

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Background: Blunt traumatic abdominal wall hernias (TAWH) occur in approximately 15,000 patients per year. Limited data are available to guide the timing of surgical intervention or the feasibility of nonoperative management.

Methods: A retrospective study of patients presenting with blunt TAWH from January 2012 through December 2018 was conducted.

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Introduction: Surgery residents have high burnout rates and mistreatment occurs during training. We hypothesized that residents who reported mistreatment would be more likely to experience burnout.

Methods: A multi-institutional observational study asked residents to complete the Maslach Burnout Inventory and to rate how often they experienced mistreatment.

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Background: Deranged physiology in trauma complicates the clinical identification of sepsis, resulting in overscreening for bacteremia. No clinical signs or biomarkers accurately diagnose sepsis in this population. Our objective was to evaluate the accuracy of the current criteria used to prompt screening for bacteremia in trauma patients and determine independent predictors of bacteremia.

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Introduction: Surgical residents have been shown to experience high rates of burnout. Whether this is influenced predominately by intrinsic characteristics, external factors, or is multifactorial has not been well studied. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between these elements and burnout.

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Objective: Non-designated preliminary (NDP) general surgery residents face the daunting challenge of obtaining a categorical residency position while undertaking the rigors of a general surgery residency. This additional application cycle represents a stressful time for these trainees and limited data exists to help guide applicants and program directors regarding the factors predictive of application success. While previous studies have focused solely on applicant related factors, no study to date has evaluated the effect of the residency program structure, institutional resources, or administrative support on these outcomes.

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Objective: After COVID-19 rendered in-person meetings for national societies impossible in the spring of 2020, the leadership of the Association of Program Directors in Surgery (APDS) innovated via a virtual format in order to hold its national meeting.

Design: APDS leadership pre-emptively considered factors that would be important to attendees including cost, value, time, professional commitments, education, sharing of relevant and current information, and networking.

Setting: The meeting was conducted using a variety of virtual formats including a web portal for entry, pre-ecorded poster and oral presentations on the APDS website, interactive panels via a web conferencing platform, and livestreaming.

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Background: Surgeon educators express concern about trainees' sense of patient ownership. We aimed to compare resident and faculty perceptions on residents' sense of personal responsibility for patient outcomes and to correlate patient ownership with resident and residency characteristics.

Methods: An anonymous electronic questionnaire surveyed 373 residents and 390 faculty at seven academic surgery residencies across the United States.

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The ACS NSQIP Surgical Risk Calculator is designed to estimate the chance of an unfavorable outcome after surgery. Our goal was to evaluate the accuracy of the calculator in our emergency general surgery population. Surgical outcomes were compared to predicted risk.

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Background: The technique for attaining photographic evidence of the critical view of safety (CVS) in laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) has previously been defined; however, the consistency, accuracy, and feasibility of CVS in practice is unknown. The aim of this study was to use an already established image sharing and grading system to determine the feasibility of timely feedback after sharing intraoperative images of the CVS and to evaluate if and how cholecystitis affects the ability to attain a CVS.

Study Design: We studied 193 laparoscopic cholecystectomies performed by 14 surgeons between August 2017 and January 2019.

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