The Art of Decision Making: Emergency Medicine Style
It’s 3pm on a Monday after a holiday. The department is bustling, and you feel like there are patients crammed into every conceivable space. Alarms are going off on patient monitors. You’re in the midst of discussing a case with a resident when a nurse puts an ECG in front of you to review and sign. Just as you finish reviewing the ECG, you turn back to your resident, only to get a phone call from the radiologist notifying you of an abnormal finding on another patient’s CT scan. After looking through the scan, you help guide your resident through an appropriate plan and disposition of the patient they saw, and decide it’s time to round on a few patients you need to see. As you rise from your chair, your EMS phone goes off, and you get word of a cardiac arrest that will arrive in 5 minutes. It’s just then that you realize you have to pee so bad it hurts. Sounds like a typical emergency department shift for many of us, doesn’t it?
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