Latest posts

A report from the first two days of the Intensive Care Society’s 2017 State of the Art meeting in Liverpool. Topics include trauma, early mobilisation, transfusion, pulmonary embolism and tracheostomy care, alongside debates about service standards, robotics and translating evidence into everyday critical care.

When emergency-department pressures affect morale, how can colleagues make the working day more supportive? Janos Baombe shares experience-based ideas about gratitude, helping others, explaining plans and choosing words carefully. He also reflects on emotional responses to difficult cases and the value of acknowledging them within the team.

Can the Ottawa subarachnoid haemorrhage rule reduce unnecessary investigation without missing serious disease? This 2017 appraisal examines its prospective validation, patient selection and the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity. Natalie May considers testing burden, clinician interpretation and why careful documentation of headache onset matters.

Could routine HIV testing make emergency care a stronger public-health opportunity? This 2017 discussion examines the rationale behind NICE’s 2016 guidance, including local prevalence, consent and follow-up. It considers how ED screening might reach people who do not attend sexual-health services and reduce barriers to diagnosis.

How do we make decisions when time is short and information incomplete? This introduction to St Emlyn’s first e-book brings together risk, probability and metacognition, explaining why thinking about our thinking matters in emergency medicine.

How much does delay matter when giving tranexamic acid? This 2017 journal club examines individual patient data from CRASH-2 and WOMAN, exploring the relationship between treatment timing and bleeding deaths, the size of the benefit and the analysis’s limitations.