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 that flu season and hospital crowding brings to our workplace. Instead […]
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 to define and is even harder to measure. How can one […]
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 continue in this direction and strongly support the creation of a […]
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!
What is Quality Improvement (QI)? You have all heard the latest buzzword in healthcare: “quality improvement”, or QI. Yet many healthcare professionals still only have a vague idea of what that truly means, and likely an even poorer understanding of how it might apply to their frontline practice. Conceptually, QI can be defined as the “combined and unceasing efforts of […]
This is a summary of a talk given by Drs. Krishan Yadav and Maggie Kisilewicz at the National Capital Conference in Emergency Medicine. Below are brief summaries and a bottom line, but of course you’ll have to read the literature yourself to make your own decisions! 1) Intensive Blood-Pressure Lowering in Patients with Acute Cerebral Hemorrhage ATACH-2 Qureshi et al. […]
Did we get your attention? Good! This is one of the areas in Acute and Critical Care Medicine which is highly controversial. This post is a desire to explore the topic after this very interesting article below came out. I hope to get some feedback but please keep it friendly! So I’m going to admit it right off the […]
Enhancing wellness: improving work efficiency may be the key
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 strategies from colleagues and the literature to help make us more […]