All posts by The Trauma Pro

August Newsletter Released To Subscribers This Weekend!

The August Trauma MedEd Newsletter will be released to subscribers over the weekend. I’ll be covering a potpourri of topics. Articles include:

  • Don’t ignore the naughty bits!
  • Cool device: Instant hemoglobin monitor
  • Do you really need to put chest tubes to water seal?
  • What to do: Small hospital, unstable patient
  • And more!

Anyone on the subscriber list as of 8PM Saturday (CST) will receive it on Sunday,August 31. I’ll release it to everyone else next Friday via the blog. So sign up for early delivery now by clicking here!

Pick up back issues here!

Nursing And Initial Resuscitation of the Burn Patient

Here’s another sample video from Trauma Education: The Next Generation 2013. It’s 18 minutes long and deals with nursing issues with airway, resuscitation, pain management, and dressings. Presented by Mark Johnston, one of the burn nurses at Regions Hospital.

Be sure to see this year’s live content next Thursday starting at 8:00am Central Time. Not in St. Paul? Watch it on LiveStream.com!

If you want to see it live in St. Paul, click here to register.

Get more info by clicking here!

You Think You Know … But You Don’t Know!

Some lessons learned about whether you’re really as smart as you think. This 20 minute presentation by me was the keynote at last year’s Trauma Education: The Next Generation conference in St. Paul.

This year’s conference still has spots available for the live presentation. You can stream it free via LiveStream. If you would like to receive continuing education credits, register for the live or streamed performance so we can get your credits to you. Click here to register.

If you don’t need the credit, just tune in next Thursday at 8AM central time on LiveStream.com. For more information, go to www.tetng.org

The Pan-Scan For Trauma

Diagnostic imaging is a mainstay in diagnosing injuries in major trauma patients. But the big questions are, how much is enough and how much is too much? X-radiation is invisible but not inocuous. Trauma professionals tend to pay little attention to radiation that they can’t see in order to diagnose things they can’t otherwise see. And which may not even be there.

There are two major camps working in emergency departments: scan selectively and scan everything. It all boils down to a balance between irradiating enough to be satisfied that nothing has been missed, and irradiating too much and causing harm later.

A very enlightening study was published last year from the group at the University of New South Wales. They prospectively looked at their experience while moving from selective scanning to pan-scanning.They studied over 600 patients in each cohort, looking at radiation exposure, missed injuries, and patient injury and discharge disposition variables.

Here are the interesting findings:

  • Absolute risk of receiving a higher radiation dose increased from 12% to 20%. This translates to 1 extra person of every 13 evaluated receiving a higher dose.
  • The incidence of receiving >20 mSv radiation dose nearly doubled after pan-scanning. This is the threshold at which we believe that cancer risk changes from low (<1:1000) to moderate (>1:1000).
  • The risk of receiving >20 mSv was lower in less severely injured patients (sigh of relief)
  • There were 6 missed injuries with selective scanning and 4 with pan-scanning (not significant). All were relatively minor.

Bottom line: Granted, the study groups are relatively small, and the science behind radiation risk is not very exact. But this study is very provocative because it shows that radiation dose increases significantly when pan-scan is used, but there was no benefit in terms of decreased missed injury. If we look at the likelihood of being helped vs harmed, patients are 26 times more likely to be harmed in the long term as they are to be helped in the short term. The defensive medicine naysayers will always argue about “that one catastrophic case” that will be missed, but I’m concerned that we’re creating some problems for our patients in the distant future that we are not worrying enough about right now.

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Reference: Comparison of radiation exposure of trauma patients from diagnostic radiology procedures before and after the introduction of a panscan protocol. Emerg Med Australasia 24(1):43-51, 2012.