Medic One Funded Projects

European Society of Emergency Medicine Conference
Megan Brew

We would like to thank Medic One for providing funding that enabled us to take our project to present at the European Society of Emergency Medicine Conference in Turin, Italy in October 2015. It was a thoroughly enjoyable few days and really interesting to hear about emergency medicine developments from around the world. We particularly enjoyed learning more about the Australian Flying Doctors and the challenges faced during practice in rural Africa. It was also very interesting to listen to the other short oral presentations in paediatric emergency medicine, and in particular hear some of the similar work that has been done since we identified a lack of research in this field.

The project itself assessed heart rate on presentation to the paediatric emergency department at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh. Heart rate is included in many triage systems and early warning scores and weighted very heavily in some of these. The inclusion of heart rate largely seems to be due to clinical consensus so we aimed to assess it as an individual parameter for severity id disease, using admission (or re-attendance and admission within 48 hours) as a proxy for disease severity. Using data from 541 eligible patients, collected over a three-week period, we found that heart rate, alone, is a poor indicator of disease severity and would therefore suggest that whilst it may useful as part of the overall clinical picture, it should maybe not be weighted quite so heavily in some of the triage systems and early warning scores used.