Category Archives: General

General

What Would You Do?

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Here’s an interesting clinical case. How would handle this difficult situation?

An 8 year old boy is struck by a car while riding his bicycle. He has obvious head trauma, and medics quickly transport him to your trauma center. He is comatose and posturing with a GCS of 5 (E1 V1 M3). RSI and intubation is carried out, and a full exam is done. Only head trauma is noted, with the right pupil a few millimeters larger than the left. The remainder of the physical exam is unremarkable, with the exception of a few extremity abrasions. FAST is negative, as are portable chest and pelvis xrays.

The child is quickly transported to CT, and this is discovered:

He is immediately transported to the OR, where your pediatric neurosurgeon immediately begins a craniotomy to evacuate the epidural hematoma. 

Thirty minutes into the case, you are summoned to the OR because the patient’s blood pressure is dropping and is not responding as expected to fluids and a touch of pressor.

What do you need to think about, and what would you do?

Please comment or tweet all the details. Answers tomorrow!

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General
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Keeping Up With Your Literature

I’ve talked a lot about how important (and easy) it is to keep up with the literature in your field. Doing this is critical to staying at the top of your game. I’m posting the link to my short video on how to do this using current technology to make it as easy as possible. 

There are three categories of sources that you should be looking at:

  • Core sources – these contain articles that almost always relate to your area of interest. I read 8 core journals each month.
  • Non-core sources – these journals occasionally contain articles important to your field. I read 15 non-core journals monthly.
  • WTF sources – Yes, WTF! (World TaeKwonDo Federation for those of you who actually don’t know what this means). These are things that are totally off topic, but interesting. They sometimes give you a kick in the head and get you thinking about things that could be important in your field. These are very important! I read 18 WTF sources, most of which are updated daily.

You can download what Scott Weingart calls “show notes” by clicking here. It summarizes and gives some specific recommendations for things discussed in the video. 

If you want to see the full list of what I read every day, click here.

Please feel free to comment and share how you keep up in your field!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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General

Bedrest After Pediatric Liver/Spleen Injury? Really?

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A set of guidelines for management of blunt solid organ injury in children developed by the American Pediatric Surgical Association was originally published in 1999. One of the elements of the guideline was to place the child on bedrest for a period of time after the injury. Arbitrarily, this period was defined as the injury grade plus one day. So for a grade 3 spleen injury, the child would have to stay in bed for 4 days (!).

A paper published this month looked at the impact of shortening this time interval. Over a 6 year period, all pediatric liver and spleen injuries from blunt trauma were identified and an abbreviated bedrest protocol was implemented. For low grade injuries (grade 1-2), children were kept in bed for 1 day, and for higher grade injuries this was extended to 2 days.

Here are the factoids:

  • 249 patients were enrolled (about 40 per year) with an average age of 10. “Bedrest was applicable for 199 patients, 80%.” Huh? Does that mean that 50 patients were excluded due to surgeon preference?
  • The organ injured was about 50:50 for spleen vs liver. Twelve children injured both.
  • Mean injury grade was 2.7, which is fairly high
  • Mean bedrest was 1.6 days, and mean hospital stay was 2.5
  • Bedrest was the limiting factor for hospital stay in 62% of cases
  • There were no delayed complications of the injury

Bottom line: Come on! Most centers don’t keep adult patients at bedrest this long, and we learned about solid organ injury management from kids! Children almost never fail nonop management, so why treat them more restrictively than adults? And have you ever tried to keep a child at bedrest? Impossible! This study is too underpowered to give real statistically valid results, but it certainly paints a good picture of what works. We’ve been keeping both adults and children at bedrest only overnight, and our average length of stay for isolated solid organs is about 1.5 days. But really, who says that staying in bed for any period of time avoids complications? There are lots of other evil things that can happen!

Related posts:

Reference: Follow up of prospective validation of an abbreviated bedrest protocol in the management of blunt spleen and liver injury in children. J Ped Surg 48(12):2437-2441, 2013.

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General

PAs and NPs In Level I Trauma Centers

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Trauma service staffing is important to maintaining trauma center status. Teaching centers in the US have been grappling with resident work hour rules, and non-teaching centers have always had to deal with how to adequately staff their trauma service. What is the impact of staffing a trauma center with midlevel practitioners (MLPs) such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners?

A state designated Level I trauma center in Pennsylvania retrospectively examined the effect of adding MLPs to an existing complement of residents on their trauma service. They examined the usual outcomes, including complications, lengths of stay, ED dwell times and mortality. 

Here are the more interesting factoids:

  • ED dwell time decreased for trauma activations and transfers in, but it increased for trauma consults. Of note, data on dwell times suffered from inconsistent charting.
  • ICU length of stay decreased significantly
  • Hospital length of stay decreased somewhat but did not achieve significance
  • The incidence of most complications stayed the same, but urinary tract infection decreased significantly
  • There was no change in mortality

Bottom line: There is a growing body of literature showing the benefits of employing midlevel providers in trauma programs. Whereas residents may have a variable interest in the trauma service based on their career goals, MLPs are professionally dedicated to this task. This study demonstrates a creative and safe solution for managing daily clinical activity on a busy trauma service.

Reference: Utilization of PAs and NPs at a level I trauma center: effects on outcomes. J Amer Acad Physician Assts, July 2011.

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General

Bowel Sounds, Or Just Plain BS?

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“Bowel sounds are normal”

How often do you see this on an H&P? Probably a lot more often than they are actually listened for, I would wager. But what do they really mean? Are they important to trauma professionals?

(Un)fortunately, there’s not a whole lot of research that’s looked at this mundane item. And pretty much all of it deals with surgical pathology (e.g. SBO) or the state of the postop abdomen. Over the years, papers have been published about the basics, and I will summarize them below:

  • Where to listen? Traditionally, auscultation is carried out in all four abdominal quadrants. However, sound transmission is such that listening centrally is usually sufficient.
  • Listen before palpation? Some papers suggest that palpation may stimulate peristalsis, so you should listen first.
  • How long should you listen? Reports vary from 30 seconds to 7 minutes (!). 
  • Significance? This is the big question. We’re not expecting to find hyperactive or high pitched sounds suggestive of surgical pathology here. Really, we’re just looking for sounds or no sounds.

But does it make a difference whether we hear anything or not?

Bottom line: In trauma, we don’t care about BS! We’ve all had patients with minimal injury and no bowel sounds, as well as patients with severe abdominal injury and normal ones. We certainly don’t have time to spend several minutes listening for something that has no bearing on our clinical assessment of the patient. Skip this unnecessary part of the physical exam, and continue on with your real evaluation!

Reference: A critical review of auscultating bowel sounds. Br J Nursing 18(18):1125-1129, 2009.

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