Jenny Guyther, MD, and Danya Khoujah, MBBS, were faculty members for the National Continued Competency Program Paramedic Refresher course, held at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, during the week of October 30. Dr. Guyther’s lectures were titled “What a Pain! A Closer Look at Head and Neck Trauma” and “Challenging the Status Quo: Where the EMS Literature is Taking Us.” Dr. Khoujah presented three lectures: “Stroke: Beyond the Basics,” “Seizures,” and “Pearls and Pitfalls of Managing Psychiatric Emergency.” The course was sponsored by UMBC’s Department of Emergency Health Services.
Laura Diegelmann, MD, RDMS, was a site coordinator for an international study on the use of ultrasound in the assessment of nontrauma patients with hypotension without an obvious cause. The study involved patients from three medical centers in North America and three in South Africa. Point-of-care ultrasound conveyed no demonstrable outcome benefit to patients with undifferentiated shock. The results of this study were published as the article titled “Does Point-of-Care Ultrasonography Improve Clinical Outcomes in Emergency Department Patients with Undifferentiated Hypotension? An International Randomized Controlled Trial from the Shoc-ED Investigators” in the October issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine.
Wendy Chang, MD, collaborated with investigators from the Departments of Neurology, Anesthesiology, and Surgery in an analysis of clinical information from patients enrolled in the Oximetry and Noninvasive Predictors of Intervention Need after Trauma (ONPOINT) study. They concluded that continuous vital sign variability and waveform analysis of the electrocardiogram or photoplethysmogram within the first hour after resuscitation constitutes a noninvasive marker of neurologic decline after traumatic brain injury.
Their work was published as the following article:
Melinosky C, Yang S, Hu P, Li H, Miller CHT, Khan I, Mackenzie C, Chang WT, Parikh G, Stein D, Badjatia N. Continuous vital sign analysis to predict secondary neurological decline after traumatic brain injury. Frontiers in Neurology 2018 Sep 25;9:761.
US Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) visited UMMC's emergency department on November 1 to discuss the effects of the opioid crisis on ED operations, the use fentanyl among ED patients, and the administration of buprenorphine to patients seeking treatment or in withdrawal. Joining in that conversation were (left to right) Mohan Suntha, MD, MBA, President and Chief Executive Officer, University of Maryland Medical Center, Michael E. Winters, MD, MBA, Senator Van Hollen, Stephen R. Thom, MD, PhD, Zachary D.W. Dezman, MD, MS, MS, and Eric Weintraub, MD, Department of Psychiatry.
Amal Mattu, MD, conducted a 21-hour course on emergency cardiology in Sarasota, Florida, from October 22 to 26. The CME course, titled "Emergency Cardiology: Beyond A-B-C and ACLS," was sponsored by American Medical Seminars. Content included electrocardiographic workshops covering cardiac ischemia and its mimics, advanced dysrhythmia recognition and management, and critical ECG findings in patients with syncope. In addition, Dr. Mattu presented lectures on cardiogenic pulmonary edema, cardiac arrest, acute coronary syndromes, low-risk chest pain, and legal pitfalls in emergency cardiology. The course was attended by over 100 health care providers in emergency medicine, internal medicine, family medicine, anesthesiology, cardiology, cardiothoracic surgery, and critical care from the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean.