INNOVATIONS IN EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE: EARLY ADOPTERS OF GERIATRIC EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS

Characterizing emergency departments to improve understanding of emergency care systems

International emergency medicine aims to understand different systems of emergency care across the globe. To date, however, international emergency medicine lacks common descriptors that can encompass the wide variety of emergency care systems in different countries. The frequent use of general, system-wide indicators (e.g. the status of emergency medicine as a medical specialty or the presence...

Geriatric Trauma Care: Challenges Facing Emergency Medical Services

Isaac Chu, BA, MPH*, Federico Vaca, MD, MPH**, Sam Stratton, MD, MPH** Bharath Chakravarthy, MD**, Wirachin Hoonpongsimanont, MD**, Shahram Lotfipour, MD, MPH** *Western University of Health Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific, Pomona, CA **Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California Irvine, School of Medicine, Irvine, CA Correspondence: Shahram Lotfipour, MD...

Geriatric care in the emergency department.

Emergency admissions to a geriatric medical unit.

DIRECT admission of patients from home is the predominant method of admission to geriatric medical units. Admission may take place as the result of a telephone consultation with the general practitioner or, in less urgent cases, following a domiciliary assessment visit by a member of the medical staff of the unit. However, in recent years the pattern of referral to hospitals in Belfast has chan...

Quality indicators for geriatric emergency care.

OBJECTIVES Emergency departments (EDs), similar to other health care environments, are concerned with improving the quality of patient care. Older patients comprise a large, growing, and particularly vulnerable subset of ED users. The project objective was to develop ED-specific quality indicators for older patients to help practitioners identify quality gaps and focus quality improvement effor...