Contributor: Santiago Cotobal Rodeles
Origin/Afiliation:Santiago Cotobal Rodeles ECG Severo Ochoa University Hospital, Leganes, Madrid, Spain
As a reporter of the ECGI, I assisted the European Society of Emergency Medicine congress that took place in Lisbon between the 27th and the 31st of October.
At the congress, I learn and remember many things about how to approach the patient, diagnose, and treat at the emergency department but especially on how to do it on the geriatrician patient.
On the 28th of October, I attended the lecture about Geriatric Emergencies. At that lecture:
Professor James Van Oppen: Talked about the importance of a frailty scale as a triage for predicting outcomes, and how according to the CFS grade we can predict the length of stay, readmission, and inpatient mortality helping us to adapt our care intentions, post-discharge support, and admission service if needed. He started the session with a real clinical case. The case of Margaret a healthy elder patient that only suffers from hypertension. She was brought to the E.D after falling and having a head trauma when she was trying to go to the toilet at night. After that she was admitted to the hospital, where they follow the falls protocol without anyone explaining to her what she was tested, so they took a blood sample and made a CT-scan after that they decided to admit her to the E.D where she suffered mild delirium, so then the M.D follow the confusion protocol, and she was admitted at the hospital for one week. The professional follow the protocols focusing on the disease instead of the patient, All the patient wanted was help for getting up from the floor and her wish was to stay home helping her husband. That’s why we as M.D need to focus on the patient on their needs and always ask what they need from us.
Professor Zerrin Defne Dündar presents the review of some articles: From them, I learned How we have to add delirium as a common presenting symptom of COVID-19, how geriatric assessment at ED might be important for decisions during the stay even if an only geriatric assessment is not useful for other conclusions if we don’t do a follow of it. The importance of ED providers for preventing falls and how telemedicine can be the future for some services for the Elder.
Last but not least Professor Aine Mitchell made some interactive quizzes that helped me to rethink the approach to the geriatric patient at the ED and present some fascinating posters that I recommend you to search online made in collaboration between EuSEM and EuGMS about how to approach the geriatric patient.
It was a fascinating congress and I would recommend ECG to attend the next one that will take place in Berlin,
