Canadi EM - By Christopher Speirs - June 30, 2022
A career in emergency medicine involves management of risk and uncertainty. We balance multiple competing priorities and make important trade-offs on a daily basis. None more so than the delicate balance between speed and safety.
You may have heard the CT scanner being spoken about in a tongue in cheek fashion as “the doughnut of death.” While there is an element of dark humour here, there is also an element of truth. So why, you may ask, do we want to take out sickest, and often most complex patients, to this unfamiliar and dangerous environment?
Well… we can’t usually fix these patients in our resus room. Many patients in this cohort have multiple injuries, or have a time critical emergency which requires urgent intervention. CT scanning is an important aid to decision making in adult trauma patients, and appropriate CT scanning has a proven mortality benefit.1 Acquisition of these images requires moving complex and unwell patients from the resuscitation room to the CT suite in a time-critical manner.
At Gold Coast University Hospital in Southport, Australia we have been exploring how to do this better through the lens of simulation. This blog post offers five tips we have found useful thus far on our journey.