The St.Emlyn’s Podcast

Expert John O'Neil discusses penetrating injuries, emphasizing early diagnosis and management. Highlighting the impact on trauma patients, challenges in assessing teenage boys, and unique physiological responses. Stressing the importance of timely recognition and urgent interventions, including thoracotomies for unstable patients. Exploring the readiness of emergency departments for treating penetrating injuries and the psychological impact on staff during resuscitative thoracotomies.

Chris Hillman, Military EM consultant, shares insights on blast injuries. Expect any injury with blast trauma. CABC approach is crucial. Apply tourniquets to stop bleeding. Be prepared for multiple casualties. Emphasizes quick decision-making and life-saving interventions in blast injuries.

Expert Steve Warriner discusses managing non-epileptiform seizures. History crucial in diagnosis, with clues like inconsistent episodes. Red flags include events during exercise and unpredictable patterns. Differentiating between epileptic and non-epileptic seizures challenging. Video analysis and observation key in accurate diagnosis. Management tough, require sustained care for affected children.

PEM Consultant David James challenges current practices in weaning plans for wheezy children. He emphasizes personalized asthma treatment and avoiding overuse of short-acting beta agonists. By implementing a weaning plan for sub-utilization in children with respiratory issues, there was a notable reduction in sub-use rates, highlighting the significance of education and patient empowerment in healthcare outcomes.

Exploring the transition to paid critical care reviews, the challenges of rare emergency medical procedures, and advancements in emergency blood transfusion for trauma cases. Delving into the complexity of medical decision-making and the critical importance of proper training and technique in managing bleeding patients and difficult airways.

Our monthly podcast round up from St Emlyn's Blog. This month Simon and Iain discuss the prehospital use of troponin measurement in the assessment of patients with chest pain and the use of AI in medicine, as well as an update about St Emlyn's WILD. Please do like and subscribe

This is the first podcast in our new series from St Emlyn's Medical School. They are specifically aimed at healthcare students and focus on the Medical Licensing Assessment (UK) presentations in particular but will be useful wherever you listen in the world.  Each episode has a standard format with a case to set the scene, a set of learning objectives, a discussion, a summary and a case resolution.  There are comprehensive listening notes on the dedicated website, as well as a growing set of other resources.  We hope you enjoy listening. The rest of the podcasts can be found on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.  The music for this series (just as it is for the St Emlyn's Podcast) is composed by Greg Beardsell

Gregory Yates, an academic doctor from Manchester, breaks down the concepts of sensitivity and specificity in diagnostic tests. Sensitivity is the 'true positive rate' while specificity is the 'true negative rate'. They discuss the importance of balancing both in medical testing, using examples like D-dimer testing in emergency medicine.

Our regular monthly round up and chat from the St Emlyn's blog. We talk about the use of artificial intelligence in research and the use of remifentanil instead of neuromuscular blockade in rapid sequence intubation. Plus more about the StEmlynsWILD conference and Simon's new role as Dean of RCEM and how you can get involved. 

Long term listeners to the St Emlyn’s podcast may remember our series entitled ‘Critical Appraisal Nuggets’ (CANs). We are absolutely delighted to reinvigorate this project under the leadership of Professor Rick Body, with the episode on semi structured interviews. In this easily digestible and succinct podcast Rick and Laura Howard go through the pros and cons of setting up semi structured interviews and how these can be used effectively in qualitative research. In the latest episode, we cover a qualitative research technique: semi-structured interviews. Qualitative research might be out of your comfort zone: we’re generally more comfortable with quantitative measures – numbers and statistics. It’s something they have experience with, having previously published a paper exploring the impact of events that happen at work on the wellbeing of emergency physicians. This was a labour of love for Laura. Laura wrote a powerful blog about it here. Semi-structured interviews are a great way to get the really rich data we need to understand something in greater depth. They allow us to ask ‘why?’ as well as just ‘what?’, ‘who?’ and ‘when?’. But reading qualitative research papers can be difficult when it takes us out of our comfort zone. In this CAN podcast, Laura and Rick take us through what semi-structured interviews are, why we might use them, how you design and conduct them, and they also have some pearls of wisdom about how to make transcribing them a lot less painful. By the end, we hope that you’ll feel confident with the basics of the technique. And if you want to practice your critical appraisal, why not put their study under the microscope?