Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU

Re:Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU by Gatsky on Saturday November 19, 2022 @03:26AM (#33668238)

Curiosity is essential. Eg guy with chest pain and trop rise gets sold by ED as a NSTEMI. But why is the pulse pressure so high? Hang on what is that scar on his back? Oh he had an aortic root repair 20 years ago after a car accident... Ok I’m calling in the radiologist at 2am to do a CT angiogram. Sure enough, his aortic root repair is failing, and he has new onset AR. Curiosity saved that guy’s ass, following the protocol would have probably killed him.

Creativity also has a role for non-critical conditions when standard treatments aren’t working.

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Re:Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU by rscho on Saturday November 19, 2022 @04:55AM (#33668720)

So curiosity as a remedy for systemic failure to perform a full exam and actually do the job correctly in the first place? Not a very convincing argument.

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Re:Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU by Gatsky on Saturday November 19, 2022 @07:16AM (#33669463)

Not really, the clinical signs were subtle, I couldn’t hear the AR. If you had a ‘protocol’ to pick up these edge cases, you would be doing a CT and echo on every chest pain that walks in the door. The workup was perfectly evidenced based and standardised.

I don’t think it is ideal to operate this way though, to be clear. Obviously this could have easily been missed by me or anyone else. But you aren’t arguing that point. You are approaching it from the perspective of minimising the variance in clinical quality. I don’t agree with you that this requires standardising how clinicians are, not just what they do.

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Re:Things I've noticed while visiting the ICU by Aeolun on Saturday November 19, 2022 @08:01AM (#33669698)

I guess this is why the hospital asks me to list historical surgeries.

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