Safety

GP Anaesthesia 2020 & Beyond

The concept of a “GP anaesthetist” or “GP obstetrician” can be a vexed one. Colleagues with the appropriate specialist ticket (FANZCA & FRANZCOG respectively in Australia) may question why the heck a general practitioner is meddling in their arena of expertise. We may hear similar from FACEMs in regard to emergency care. I have no doubt […]

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Got droperidol?

If you’ve been following blogs such as THE PHARM recently, you’ll probably have seen reference to a chap called Minh le Cong and a drug called ketamine.  Now it’s no secret that many in the prehospital and emergency fields are fond of ketamine – it’s a useful dissociative agent with analgesic properties and can be

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Lessons for management of acute agitation in rural EDs

The South Australian Coroner has just released a report into the sad death of Mr Simos, who died whilst awaiting transfer from a rural ED back to a tertiary centre where he was under a current detention order. The Coroners report can be accessed here. As with all Coroner’s reports, it makes for salutary reading and

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Updated RERN Action Cards

I’ve been playing around with cognitive aids such as checklists and action cards for a couple of years (some are available via the RESOURCES section of this site or RURALDOCTORS.NET. Most of these were designed for handing off to nursing staff in the rural ED, partly to mitigate against the phenomenon of people disappearing off to the ‘big

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They’re not accidents, are they?

It was back in 2001 that I read a piece in the British Medical Journal entitled “BMJ bans accidents” – hardly a new idea (it dates back to at least 1993) – yet we still hear reference to “road traffic accidents” (RTAs) or “motor vehicle accidents” (MVAs). Words are important; I have been convinced of

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