The prehospital episode

By popular demand, this episode will be dedicated to talking about prehospital issues. I’ve had several people write me and ask for my 0.02 on how EMS can better be our “eyes and ears” in the field so here’s my take on this question. I’ll also talk about how the ED staff can better interact with our EMS colleagues so we can both work together to deliver optimal care to our patients. Hopefully this will serve as a starting point for conversations between EMS providers and ED staff and I encourage anyone to post comments on these issues to the blog.

Prehospital Episode

Sepsis

This is a topic podcast on sepsis. This is a hot topic in emergency medicine and we are usually the front line in the fight against sepsis. Ever since the Rivers sepsis article emergency department physicians, nurses, techs, and even prehospital providers have played a much larger role in instituting early aggressive therapy for patients with sepsis. This podcast will go over the basics of sepsis (you may be surprised to know that a patient with strep pharyngitis and  fever technically meets criteria for sepsis) and reviews the basics of how to aggressively treat severe sepsis and septic shock.

Before you go any further, if you haven’t read this article already, take a few minutes and read the original Rivers sepsis article form the New England Journal of Medicine that changed the game in regards to Emergency Department management of sepsis.  Here is the full text link (free access):

Rivers NEJM sepsis study

Check out the latest guidelines and literature on sepsis at the Surviving Sepsis campaign website

Survivingsepsis.org

Also mentioned in the podcast is a new trauma blog that I’ve started following.  It’s called the Trauma Professionals blog and it is written by Dr. Michael McGonigal, a trauma surgeon in Minnesota.  Each post goes through a trauma topic with supporting primary literature.  If you are looking to expand your knowledge on advanced trauma topics, this is the blog to go to.

The Trauma Professional’s Blog

Finally- an abstract on EM Basic was accepted for a poster presentation at the CORD-EM conference in April.  Another abstract is pending for the SAEM meeting in May

CORD-EM website

SAEM website

Here are the links to the podcast and the show notes

Sepsis podcast

Sepsis show notes (Word format)

Sepsis show notes (PDF format)