Emergency overcrowding and access block: A smaller problem than we think.

Objectives: Emergency department (ED) access block, the inability to provide timely care for high acuity patients, is the leading safety concern in First World EDs. The main cause of ED access block is hospital access block with prolonged boarding of inpatients in emergency stretchers. Cumulative emergency access gap, the product of the number of arriving high acuity patients and their average delay to reach a care space, is a novel access measure that provides a facility-level estimate of total emergency care delays.

Nursing duties and accreditation standards and their impacts: The nursing perspective.

Background: Medical advances and increasingly complex patients presenting to the Emergency Department (ED) make nursing challenging. Gaining new knowledge and skills is a perpetual requirement. New quality initiatives to improve patient safety and care are being constantly introduced and create significant work and time pressures for healthcare providers involved.

The development of a national emergency medical services curriculum framework for physicians in Canada.

Background: As the role of emergency medical services (EMS) continues to expand, EMS physicians and medical directors require special skills and training to keep pace with the rapidly evolving subspecialty of EMS. In Canada, subspecialty training in EMS is still relatively new, and a standard national curriculum for physician EMS training does not exist.

Objective: To develop a national EMS curriculum for emergency medicine (EM) residents and fellows and an abbreviated curriculum for non-EM trainees and community physicians.