Publications by authors named "R J Zalenski"

Undergraduate medical education (UGME) is the time when doctors' attitudes toward patients and their profession are formed. It is also a period of tremendous stress for future physicians, including high levels of negative stress. Such stress can be maladaptive and may sow the seeds of burnout and long-term dissatisfaction.

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Subdural hematoma (SDH) impacts up to 58.1 per 100,000 individuals aged ≥65 years. Some patients or proxies elect to focus exclusively on comfort care treatments, whereas others may consider surgical procedures such as a craniotomy or cranial trephination (burr hole) to relieve intracranial pressure.

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Objectives: Emergency medicine (EM) physicians commonly care for patients with serious life-limiting illness. Hospice and palliative medicine (HPM) is a subspecialty pathway of EM. Although a subspecialty level of practice requires additional training, primary-level skills of HPM such as effective communication and symptom management are part of routine clinical care and expected of EM residents.

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Context: There are few multicenter studies that examine the impact of systematic screening for palliative care and specialty consultation in the intensive care unit (ICU).

Objective: To determine the outcomes of receiving palliative care consultation (PCC) for patients who screened positive on palliative care referral criteria.

Methods: In a prospective quality assurance intervention with a retrospective analysis, the covariate balancing propensity score method was used to estimate the conditional probability of receiving a PCC and to balance important covariates.

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