Impact of scribes on emergency medicine doctors' productivity and patient throughput: multicentre randomised trial.

Objectives: To evaluate the changes in productivity when scribes were used by emergency physicians in emergency departments in Australia and assess the effect of scribes on throughput.

Design: Randomised, multicentre clinical trial.

Setting: Five emergency departments in Victoria used Australian trained scribes during their respective trial periods.

The quality of medical record review studies in the international emergency medicine literature.

Study Objective: We assess the methodologic quality of studies using medical record review methodology in 4 international emergency medicine journals. A secondary aim was to compare methodology quality among these journals and across years.

Methods: This was an observational study of articles whose main methodology was medical record review published in Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM) , Annals of Emergency Medicine (Annals) , Emergency Medicine Journal (EMJ) , and Emergency Medicine Australasia (EMA) between January 2002 and May 2004.