The St.Emlyn’s Podcast

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?

Lots of chat about St Emlyn's WILD and just what you can expect if you join us in the Lake District in June, as well as discussion about ECMO in cardiac arrest and just how many of our patients with 'minor head injuries' will actually have ongoing symptoms weeks and even months later.    Click here to buy tickets for #StEmlynsWILD

A special double edition covering the blog posts from November and December and more. We discuss evidence based medicine with the DoseVF trial, and more from RECOVERY, discussion about 'what is downtime' and how we organise follow up for patients who don't live in our area and what happened at the amazing London Trauma Conference We also announced some of the plans for StEmlynsWILD. Look out for booking details and more in the coming weeks. 

Wellbeing is very complex, as it is an individual construct that is strongly aligned and interpreted through a lens of personal values, philosophy, culture, faith, and goals for life. Most importantly, wellbeing is dynamic rather than homeostatic and a subjective state determined by the individual. Yet we use the term wellbeing to describe a wide variety of different things (often in terms of being the opposite of burnout which it most certainly isn't).  In this second episode of our series Liz Crowe discusses in detail what the literature says about wellbeing and how we may be able to use this going forward. Please do like and subscribe. Thanks for listening.

Burnout is a term that seems to be used a lot these days, but what does it really mean? In this episode Dr Liz Crowe explains all, and will almost certainly change the way you view burnout.  Liz, who be well known to St Emyn's audiences, has just completed her PhD on "Understanding the risk and protective factors for burnout and wellbeing of staff working in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit: PICU staff wellbeing" and has an unrivalled real world and evidence based experience of what these terms really mean. In this first in a special series Liz goes into depth describing not only what burnout is, but how it can be measured (and the limitations of this) and most importantly how this is a system issue and not a diagnosis. In the next episode we will discuss another commonly used term 'wellbeing'. We think this series is incredibly important and hope you will help us share it far and wide. You can read the accompanying blogpost here.

In our new regular slot of the middle Monday of the month we're delighted to bring you the highlights from the St Emlyn's blog this month., Iain and Simon chat about batching in EDs, Ossilation in decision making and a whole lot more about trauma (chest drains, extrication, sex and TXA and rib fixation). Please do like and subscribe and keep an eye out for our new sister website St Emlyn's Medical School and it's podcast series coming soon. 

Join Iain and Simon for this month's round up of September's blog content from St Emlyn's. They discuss managing harm in the ED; management of traumatic brain injury; Head Up mechanical CPR and fentanyl in RSI. Lots to think about and discuss. Please do like and subscribe and get in touch if there is anything you'd like us to cover on the blog and podcast, or perhaps you'd even like to write something for publication.