Hospital patient boarding in emergency departments has reached unprecedented crisis levels over the past 4 years. Boarding and crowding has been demonstrated by prior literature to have adverse effects on patient care as well as increased associated costs. Importantly, the increase in hospital patient boarding has created critical shortcomings in disaster preparedness by limiting the capacity of emergency departments to respond to mass casualty incidents due to space and staffing constraints.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Increasing the diversity of the emergency medicine (EM) workforce is imperative, with more diverse teams showing improved patient care and increased innovation. Holistic review, adapted from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), focuses on screening applicants with a balanced method, valuing their experiences, attributes, and academic metrics equally. A core tenet to holistic review is that diversity is essential to excellence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: One published strategy for improving educational experiences for medical students in the emergency department (ED) while maintaining patient care has been the implementation of dedicated teaching attending shifts. To leverage the advantages of the ED as an exceptional clinical educational environment and to address the challenges posed by the rapid pace and high volume of the ED, our institution developed a clerkship curriculum that incorporates a dedicated clinical educator role - the teaching attending - to deliver quality bedside teaching experiences for students in a required third-year clerkship. The purpose of this educational innovation was to determine whether a dedicated teaching attending experience on a third-year required emergency medicine (EM) clerkship would improve student-reported clinical teaching evaluations and student-reported satisfaction with the overall quality of the EM clerkship.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA 22-year-old man with a history of intravenous methamphetamine use presented with severe headache for 5 days, was afebrile, and had nuchal rigidity. Computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging results were interpreted as revealing acute subarachnoid hemorrhage. Twenty-four hours later, he developed acute neurologic deterioration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOral presentations are a critical element in the communication of medical knowledge between students and faculty, but in most locations, the amount of time spent on teaching the oral presentation is minimal. Furthermore, the standard oral presentation does not work well within the emergency medicine (EM) setting, due to time constraints and the different principles that make EM a unique specialty. This article provides a suggested approach on how to educate students on optimal oral presentations in EM, as well as providing a link to an online guide instructing medical students how to give oral presentations.
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