Before we delve into this, we would like to point out that we’re fortunate to have Dr. Paul Pageau (ER Physician and current CAEP president) and Dr. Lorne Wiesenfeld (ER Physician and current Vice-Dean for the PGME) guest writing our final post for wellness week. These two have an wealthRead More →
Forget everything you’ve heard about mindfulness and “living in the moment.” These common phrases are overused, and at this point are laden with misunderstandings. Forget the pop-psychology one-liners about mindfulness, the cute little sayings, the iPhone apps, one week challenges and everything else you’ve heard. For the moment, forget everythingRead More →
As we delve deeper into wellness week, an important consideration many of us often have is the time we have available to us. Our personal and professional lives are often so chaotic, it is easy to find excuses not to make time for wellness. Here, we will examine some select strategiesRead More →
At the beginning of every New Year, many people express their gratitude for those who have positively impacted them in the past year. However, just like New Year’s resolutions, these emotions of gratitude quickly seem to fade. As January moves forward we tend to increasingly focus on the challenges thatRead More →
The Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Ottawa has a clear dedication to wellness, demonstrated by the creation of a Director of Wellness position for our academic group. Although the learning curve has been steep, one thing has quickly become clear: wellness is a vague concept, hard toRead More →
In January 2017, a group of residents at CAEP and ACEP put together an Emergency Medicine (EM) Wellness week. We think this was a fantastic initiative that covered the importance of physical and spiritual health, and how to stay well in our challenging working environment. We would like to continueRead More →
Dr. Perry and Colleagues have previously derived and validated the Ottawa SAH rule for patients with suspected subarachnoid hemorrhage, here we present the multicenter prospective validation of the rule1, with some insight on the rule from Dr. Perry himself! Note that the infographic included within this post is printable forRead More →
A female in her 70s from a nursing home with a past medical history of dementia, obesity, COPD, and CHF presents to the emergency department with a decreased level of consciousness and shortness of breath. Seven days ago she was assessed in the ER with a diagnosis of aspiration pneumoniaRead More →
Opioid and narcotic abuse has been a problem in Canada for some time, but nothing compares to the rapid sweep of opioid-related deaths and hospitalizations that have occurred over the past 2-3 years. While at one time, this problem was limited to a few pockets on the west coast, weRead More →
Recently, Dr. Venkatesh Thiruganasambandamoorthy et al published the Canadian Syncope Risk Score, for the assessment of adult patients with syncope. He has previously helped provide some insight into the decision rule, and we now present an infographic and memory aid to help recall the score!Read More →