by Alex Viau, Josee Malette, Mejbel Alazemi | Oct 7, 2021 | Featured, Grand Round Summaries
Pulling back the Pall from palliative care The word pall refers to a traditional death shroud or a dark cloud of dust or smoke. The aim of this blog post is both explore some of the inequities and recommendations for the palliative care landscape today, but also to...
by Omar Anjum, Alex Coutin | Sep 2, 2021 | cardiac arrest, Cardiology, Critical Care, Featured, Grand Round Summaries
Cardiogenic shock (CS) is considered the most severe form of acute heart failure. It is an important and often under-recognized clinical entity in the emergency department (ED). The difficulty in diagnosis lies in its diverse presentations, overlap with other shock...
by Renee Bradley, Josee Malette | Aug 26, 2021 | Featured, Grand Round Summaries, Resuscitation, Ultrasound
There are 35,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) annually in Canada6. Patient survival in OHCA increases dramatically with resuscitation; bystander CPR, use of AEDs and activation of EMS. Signifiant gains have been made with education at both the community and...
by Nick Schouela, Josee Malette | Jul 22, 2021 | Commentary, Featured, Grand Round Summaries
Patient complaints are common in medicine. Emergency medicine (EM) in particular has some of the highest numbers of complaints, just behind obstetrics and surgery. Almost all of you reading this have probably been subject to some sort of complaint, and if it...
by Alexandra Hamelin, Alie Wudwud | Jul 15, 2021 | Critical Care, Featured, Grand Round Summaries, Resuscitation, Social Media, Toxicology
In this blog post, Dr. Alexandra Hamelin weighs in on many of the controversies surrounding activated charcoal (AC), and provides a practical approach for its use in overdose patients in the emergency department. Specifically: The dosing of AC The time window...
by Darren Wong, Josee Malette | Jun 10, 2021 | cardiac arrest, Critical Care, Featured, Grand Round Summaries, Resuscitation
In the first part of this series, we looked at the basics of Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) and its primary indications. In this section, we will discuss the factors that are needed to implement an ED ECMO program and what happens when a code ECPR is...
by Doran Drew | Jun 8, 2021 | Commentary, Critical Care, Grand Round Summaries, Journal Club, Resuscitation
Hey everyone! Buckle up. This is a long one. To provide context, I recently presented a 2-part blog post regarding thrombolytics in acute ischemic stroke. In these posts I explored the foundational literature for this tPA, as well as some of the common controversies I...
by Darren Wong, Josee Malette | Jun 3, 2021 | Grand Round Summaries, Respirology, Resuscitation
Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) has significantly progressed over the past decades. It has become an invaluable tool in the care of adults with severe cardiac and pulmonary disease refractory to conventional management. The implementation of ECMO has even...
by Doran Drew, Josee Malette | May 27, 2021 | Featured, Grand Round Summaries, Neurology, Thrombosis
Addressing the Controversies Around Thrombolytic Therapy (tPA) In our previous blog post, we reviewed the formative literature supporting the currently used tPA time window. The figure below highlights a summary of the time windows investigated within each study and...
by Doran Drew, Josee Malette, Kate O'Connell | May 20, 2021 | Featured, Grand Round Summaries, Neurology, Thrombosis
Review of the formative literature of our current tPA time window in Acute Ischemic Stroke After numerous case series and smaller prospective studies suggesting benefit for thrombolytic therapy (tPA), the early 90s ushered in the era of thrombolytic RCTs for acute...
