The Resus Room

The UK REBOA trial left many with doubts over its utility for trauma patients in ED. The time from injury to its use was around 90 minutes and the trial was stopped when it didn't reduce and maybe even increased mortality compared to standard care alone. But what effect does REBOA have when used prehospitally and how feasible is it? Our first paper, from London HEMS, looks at this and gives a fasc...

Acute Kidney Injury is common, complicated and holds significant morbidity and mortality. But...if we recognise it, we can make a real difference to our patients' outcomes. In this episode we run through the anatomy, physiology and aetiologies. We have a think about the multitude of definitions of AKI and then take each of the pre renal, renal and post renal categories and think about the ways we...

There's a huge paper to talk about this month in the PREOXI trial, a multi centre RCT looking at the pre oxygenation strategy in critically unwell patients undergoing RSI, with patients either getting high flow oxygen through a facemask or NIV. The results are pretty remarkable and may well be practice changing as we'll discuss in the podcast! Next up we take a look at a feasibility of lidocaine p...

So this month we're looking at major incidents and specifically the triage process that is now coming into play in the UK and further afield that you need to know about! We normally stick pretty strongly to clinical topics; they're pretty easy to focus on because you can imagine how extra knowledge in a certain clinical area could make a difference to presentations that we see pretty commonly. And...

Welcome back to June's Papers of the month! We kick off this month looking at the work up of patients with a first episode of psychosis. With these patients there is a chance of a psychosis secondary to an underlying structural cause. Getting neuro-imaging to look for this prior to psychiatric assessment is tricky though, often with a need for sedation and then the subsequent delay for psychiatric...

We've covered Cardiac Arrest management (as in the medical delivery of it) in a previous Roadside to Resusepsiode. Since then we've had some updates with Paramedic-2, Refractory VF, Airways-2  and a whole host of other papers. But what we haven't talked much about is the art of creating the environment, space & workflow to deliver the best medical care possible.  Whilst these might seem like less...

Welcome back to the podcast and three great papers for May's episode! First up we take a pretty deep look into refractory VF. This follows on from our our review of DOSE-VF in December '22's papers of the month and our recent Roadside to Resus on the topic. In that we discussed the possibility that many of the cases we see at pulse checks as being refractory VF may actually have had 5 seconds or m...

Lower back pain is a really common cause for patients to present to primary care, urgent care and emergency care. Thankfully many of these cases are self limiting, but somewhere in the region of 1:300 patients with back pain in the ED will have Cauda Equina Syndrome. Cauda Equina Syndrome is something that is challenging for all clinicians because many patients with simple lower back pain may have...

Welcome back to the podcast! Three more papers covering topics that are relevant to all of our practice. The importance of removing wet clothes from patients is often discussed, both to prevent hypothermia and increase patient comfort. But how important is it to get wet clothes off and is it something we can defer to a different point? We start off taking a look at an RCT on this very question. Ne...

End Tidal CO2, or ETCO2 for short, is something that's talked about pretty often in Emergency and Critical Care and that's because it's used a lot in the assessment and treatment of patients! It's got a big part to play in airway management, resuscitation, sedation and is also increasingly used in other situations. Some of these applications have some pretty strong evidence to back them up but oth...

Welcome back to the podcast, a new month, three more papers and discussion around the topics. We kick off with a paper comparing mechanical ventilation in CPR compared to the more traditional hand ventilation; what difference does the machine make to ventilation in arrest and should we be changing to this strategy as a standard? We've talked about aneurysmal subarachnoid haemorrhage a fair amount...

As we all know, rapid and effective resuscitation makes a huge difference to the chance of survival from a cardiac arrest. If you're going to pick a rhythm to have as the patient or as the Resuscitationist, then it's going to be a shockable rhythm, so VF or pulseless VT as they hold the greatest chance of survival. You'll find an initial shockable rhythm in around 20% of cases & defibrillation alo...

Welcome back to February's papers of the month. Syncope is a really common presentation to the Emergency Department and it can be complicated to tease out those with a concerning precipitant from the others with a more benign cause. The first paper gives us some context to the management of these undifferentiated syncopes and provides a barometer for how stringently ESC guidance on the topic is fo...

Fever is an incredibly effective mechanism to fight off pathogens. Clearly, whilst many illnesses that cause a fever don't require anything more than the body's natural response, there are some patients in which a fever might represent a serious illness. Differentiating those serious illnesses from self-limiting presentations can be tricky at times, but can also be anxiety provoking for clinicians...

Happy New Year! We've got some great topic and in person events lined up for 2024 which we'll be able to share some more details about with you soon. This month we look at an RCT of conservative airway management in patients with a low GCS following presentation with acute poisoning. Next up we take a look at paper reviewing our diagnostic ability with dissociative seizures; this gives us some rea...

We know it's the festive season but we thought we'd try and cover an issue from which there appears to be no escape and is a particular problem at this time of year, queuing! Whether we like it or not, this has become a factor for all of us working in emergency care, whether its delays getting your patient into the department, queueing down the corridor into ED, a prolonged stay in ED for an appro...

We've talked about Aortic Dissection before in our Roadside to Resus episode and the huge difficulties in picking out these rare but potentially devastating cases and this month we've got a fantastic paper on the topic! The DAShED study looks at patients presenting with symptoms that could be suggestive of aortic dissection and helps us understand the diagnostic challenge and approach to acute aor...

Blood gases are really commonly used in ED, Critical Care, Respiratory Medicine and Prehospitally. In fact, you'd do well to walk 10 meters in an ED without being given one to sign off! But it's for good reason, because they give you additional information about what's going on from a respiratory and metabolic perspective in the patient. And it's probably worth mentioning at this point, this episo...

Well this has been a huge month for Emergency Medicine and Critical Care in terms of papers! We start off looking at REBOA; many resuscitationist's favourite concept or device with the much awaited UK-REBOA trial. What does the paper mean for practice in our Resus Rooms? Is this about to become a key part of trauma management? The paper is fascinating and one of the most though provoking we've dis...

In this episode we're going to cover the 'atraumatic' or 'spontaneous' pneumothoraces and focus on some new key guidelines from the British Thoracic Society which came out in July this year and also look at the relevant evidence on the topic. There are pretty significant changes in the BTS guidance, it's no longer about finding a pneumothorax, working out if it's primary or secondary and then acti...

Welcome back! This month we kick off looking at an RCT which looks at whether we should convey patients with a ROSC from a likely cardiac cause (without a STEMI in their ECG) to a cardiac arrest centre, or whether they would be as well served at their local Emergency Department. This paper has huge potential implications for service design for cardiac arrest patients. Next up we look at another RC...

Delivering excellent End of Life Care in the Emergency Care is a real challenge but also a huge privilege and has formed some of the most rewarding parts of our careers to date. We've been really keen to End of Life Care as a topic for a while now. M any, if not all of you, will have been out to these patients or received them in your ED.  They aren't simple cases to manage, with lots of issues ar...

Welcome back to the podcast, coming to you all the way from Australia! Rob and James were fortunate enough to be invited to deliver the keynote and an airway masterclass at this year's Australian College of Paramedicine International Conference. At what was an amazing meeting, they were lucky enough to be able to catch up with some of the fantastic speakers to hear the key parts of their talks. In...

Welcome back to the podcast! We're back with three really interesting papers after our summer break, with some great points to think about with regards to our practice and patient outcomes. First up we take a look at the CT FIRST study which looks at the benefit of whole body CT in patients presenting with a ROSC after their out of hospital cardiac arrest with no obvious cause. Should we be more l...

Welcome back, this is our last podcast before our short summer break! We start off having a look at the physiological effects of prolonged resuscitation with a supraglottic device compared with endotracheal intubation, which raises some really interesting questions about our ongoing ventilation strategy in resuscitations. Next up we look at an RCT comparing RSI to DSI in critically injured patient...