In this EM Cases episode on Pediatric Procedural Sedation with Dr. Amy Drendel, a world leader in pediatric pain management and procedural sedation research, we discuss how best to manage pain and anxiety in three situations in the ED: the child with a painful fracture, the child who requires imaging in the radiology department and the child who requires a lumbar puncture. Without a solid understanding and knowledge of the various options available to you for high quality procedural sedation, you inevitably get left with a screaming suffering child, upset and angry parents and endless frustration doe you. It can make or break an ED shift. With finesse and expertise, Dr. Drendel answers such questions as: What are the risk factors for a failed Pediatric Procedural Sedation? Why is IV Ketamine preferred over IM Ketamine? In what situations is Nitrous Oxide an ideal sedative? How long does a child need to be observed in the ED after Procedural Sedation? Do children need to have fasted before procedural sedation? What is the anxiolytic of choice for children requiring a CT scan? and many more...

I caught up with Dr. Anand Swaminathan, otherwise known as EM Swami, at The Teaching Course in NYC where he told his Best Case Ever from Janus General of his heroic and collaborative attempts at saving the life of a gentleman who presented to the ED with a classic story for a ruptured AAA. As William Olser famously said, "There is no disease more conducive to clinical humility than aneurysm of the aorta."

While knowledge acquisition is vital to developing your clinical skills as an EM provider, using that knowledge effectively for decision making in EM requires a whole other set of skills. In this EM Cases episode on Decision Making in EM Part 2 - Cognitive Debiasing, Situational Awareness & Preferred Error, we explore some of the concepts introduced in Episode 11 on Cognitive Decision Making like cognitive debiasing strategies, and some of the concepts introduced in Episode 62 Diagnostic Decision Making Part 1 like risk tolerance, with the goal of helping you gain insight into how we think and when to take action so you can ultimately take better care of your patients. Walter Himmel, Chris Hicks and David Dushenski answer questions such as: How do expert clinicians blend Type 1 and Type 2 thinking to make decisions? How do expert clinicians use their mistakes and reflect on their experience to improve their decision making skills? How can we mitigate the detrimental effects of affective bias, high decision density and decision fatigue that are so abundant in the ED? How can we use mental rehearsal to not only improve our procedural skills but also our team-based resuscitation skills? How can we improve our situational awareness to make our clinical assessments more robust? How can anticipatory guidance improve the care of your non-critical patients as well as the flow of a resuscitation? How can understanding the concept of preferred error help us make critical time-sensitive decisions? and many more important decision making in EM nuggets...

Traditionally we've run at least 2 troponins 6 or 8 hours apart to help rule out MI and recently in algorithms like the HEART score we've combined clinical data with a 2 or 3 hour delta troponin to help rule out MI. The paper we'll be discussing here is a multicentre/multinantional study from the Canadian Medical Association Journal from this year out of Switzerland entitled "Prospective validation of a 1 hour algorithm to rule out and rule in acute myocardial infarction using a high sensitivity cardian troponin T assay" with lead author Tobias Reichlin. It not only looks at whether or not we can rule out MI using a delta troponin at only 1 hour but whether or not we can expedite the ruling in of MI using this protocol.

No questions foundPain leads to suffering. Opioid misuse leads to suffering. We strive to avoid both for our patients. On the one hand, treating pain is one of the most important things we do in emergency medicine to help our patients and we need to be aggressive in getting our patients' pain under control in a timely, effective, sustained and safe fashion. This was the emphasis 10-20 years ago after studies showed that we were poor at managing pain and our patients were suffering. On the other hand, opioid dependence, addiction, abuse and misuse are an enormous public health issue. Opioid misuse in Emergency Medicine has become a major problem in North America over the past 10 years at least partly as a reaction to the years that we were being told that we were failing at pain management. As Dr. Reuben Strayer said in his SMACC talk on the topic: “Opioid misuse explodes in our face on nearly every shift, splattering the entire department with pain and suffering, and addiction and malingering and cursing and threats and hospital security, and miosis and apnea and naloxone and cardiac arrest.” So how do we strike a balance between managing pain effectively and providing the seed for perpetuating a drug addiction or feeding a pre-existing drug addiction? How do we best take care of our patients who you suspect might have an opiod misuse problem? To help us sort through this difficult conundrum we have Dr. David Juurlink, a toxicologist and Dr. Reuben Strayer an EM physician, who both a special interest in opioid misuse. Written Summary & blog post prepared by Keerat Grewal, edited by Anton Helman, December 2015 Cite this podcast as: Juurlink, D, Strayer, R, Helman, A. Opioid Misuse in Emergency Medicine. Emergency Medicine Cases. December, 2015. https://emergencymedicinecases.com/opioid-misuse-emergency-medicine/. Accessed [date]. Here are some numbers that may surprise you: In a recent ED study on opioid prescribing patterns in Annals of EM, 17% of patients in the US were prescribed opioids on discharge from EDs. In Ontario, about 10 people die accidentally from prescription opioids every week. Between 1990 and 2010, drug overdose deaths in the US increased by almost four fold, eclipsing the rate of death from motor vehicle collisions in 2009. This was driven by deaths related to prescription opioids, which now kill more people than heroin and cocaine combined. Opioids are the most prescribed class of medication in the US. In 2010, one out of every eight deaths among persons aged 25 to 34 years was opioid-related. Four out of 5 new heroin users report that their initial drug was a prescription opioid. In Ontario, three times the people died from opiate overdose than from HIV in 2011. Fig 1: Opioid sales, admissions, and deaths in the U.S. Who is at risk for Opioid Misuse in Emergency Medicine? All ED patients are at risk for opiod misuse, regardless of their risk factors. Even opioid-naive patients with no risk factors for opioid misuse are at risk for developing opioid misuse problems. Nonetheless, their are particular risk factors, red and yellow flags that should raise your suspicion for pre-existing opioid misuse and help guide management. (see Figure 2 and 3) Patients at particularly high risk for opioid misuse include: Young age (< 40 years old) Psychiatric history Substance abuse history Benzodiazepine use Fig 2: Red & Yellow Flags for Opioid Misuse (courtesy of Dr. R. Strayer) Fig 3: Risk Stratification for Opioid Misuse (courtesy of Dr. R. Strayer) Trajectories of Opioid Use in Emergency Medicine There are various trajectories that patients who are prescribed opioids may follow (see Figure 4). We must consider the risks of prescribing opioids to opioid naive patients, and their risk of opioid misuse. As previously described, even among patients thought to be ‘low risk’ for opioid misuse, some of these patients will develop risky drug behaviours with opioids. Fig 4: Opioid Use Trajectories (courtesy of Dr. R. Strayer)

Pediatric seizures are common. So common that about 5% of all children will have a seizure by the time they’re 16 years old. If any of you have been parents of a child who suddenly starts seizing, you’ll know intimately how terrifying it can be. While most of the kids who present to the ED with a seizure will end up being diagnosed with a benign simple febrile seizure, some kids will suffer from complex febrile seizures, requiring some more thought, work-up and management, while others will have afebrile seizures which are a whole other kettle of fish. We need to know how to differentiate these entities, how to work-them up and how to manage them in the ED. At the other end of the spectrum of disease there is status epilepticus – a true emergency with a scary mortality rate - where you need to act fast and know your algorithms like the back of your hand. This topic was chosen based on a nation-wide needs assessment study conducted by TREKK (Translating Emergency Knowledge for Kids), a collaborator with EM Cases. With the help of two of Canada’s Pediatric Emergency Medicine seizure experts hand picked by TREKK, Dr. Lawrence Richer and Dr. Angelo Mikrogianakis, we’ll give you the all the tools you need to approach the child who presents to the ED with seizure with the utmost confidence.

When was the last time you saw ventricular fibrillation in a 4 month old? Dr. Simard tells his Best Case Ever of a Pediatric Cardiac Arrest in which meticulous preparation, sticking to his guns, early activation of the transportation service, and clever use of point of care ultrasound helped save the life of a child. He explains the importance of debriefing your team after an emotionally charged case.

Once we've achieved ROSC our job is not over. Good post-arrest care involves maintaining blood pressure and cerebral perfusion, adequate sedation, cooling and preventing hyperthermia, considering antiarrhythmic medications, optimization of tissue oxygen delivery while avoiding hyperoxia, getting patients to PCI who need it, and looking for and treating the underlying cause. Dr. Lin and Dr. Morrison offer us their opinion on the new simplified approach to diagnosing the underlying cause of PEA arrests. We'll also discuss when it's time to terminate resuscitation or 'call the code' as well as some fascinating research on gender differences in cardiac arrest care. These co-authors of the guidelines will give us their vision of the future of cardiac arrest care and we'll wrap up the episode with a third opinion, so to speak: Dr. Weingart's take on the whole thing....

A lot has changed over the years when it comes to managing the adult in cardiac arrest. As a result, survival rates after cardiac arrest have risen steadily over the last decade. With the release of the 2015 American Heart Association ACLS Guidelines 2015 online on Oct 16th, while there aren’t a lot a big changes, there are many small but important changes we need to be aware of, and there still remains a lot of controversy. In light of knowing how to provide optimal cardio-cerebral resuscitation and improving patient outcomes, in this episode we’ll ask two Canadian co-authors of The Guidelines, Dr. Laurie Morrison and Dr. Steve Lin some of the most practice-changing and controversial questions.

Opiate misuse is everywhere. Approximately 15-20% of ED patients in the US are prescribed outpatient opiates upon discharge. In Ontario, about 10 people die accidentally from prescription opiates every week. Between 1990 and 2010, drug overdose deaths in the US increased by almost four fold, eclipsing the rate of death from motor vehicle collisions in 2009. This was driven by deaths related to prescription opiates, which now kill more people than heroin and cocaine combined. Opiates are the most prescribed class of medication in the US. In 2010, one out of every eight deaths among persons aged 25 to 34 years was opiate-related. Four out of 5 new heroin users report that their initial drug was a prescription opiate. In Ontario, three times the people died from opiate overdose than from HIV in 2011. Yet, we are expected to treat pain aggressively in the ED. Dr. Reuben Strayer, the brains behind the fantastic blog EM Updates tells his Best Case Ever, in which he realizes the importance of physician compassion in approaching the challenging drug seekers and malingerers that we manage in the ED on a regular basis. This Best Case Ever is in anticipation of an upcoming main episode in which Dr. Strayer and toxicologist Dr. David Juurlink discuss how to strike a balance between managing pain effectively and providing the seed for perpetuating a drug addiction or feeding a pre-existing drug addiction, and how we best take care of our patients who we suspect might have a drug misuse problem.