The St.Emlyn’s Podcast St Emlyn’s Blog and Podcast
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- Health & Fitness
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St Emlyn's is the premier emergency medicine podcast from the UK. We cover evidence based medicine, clinical excellence, wellbeing and the philosophy of emergency care.
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Ep 228 - January 2024 Monthly Round Up - New Year Resolutions, intubating poisoned patients and wellbeing in the ED
It's episode one of season 11 and Simon and Iain chat through the blog content from St Emlyn's from January 2024. There's discussion about New Year resolutions and how to make them habits, intubating poisoned patients with a decreased conscious level and what we can possibly do to improve the working conditions in our Emergency Departments.
As ever, we hope you enjoy the podcast. Please do like and subscribe, and if you'd like to contribute to St Emlyn's in any way please get in touch. -
Ep 210 - January 2023 Monthly Round Up
Lots of chat about St Emlyn’s WILD and just what you can expect if you join us in the Lake District in JUne, as well as discussion about ECMO in cardiac arrest and just how many of our patients with ’minor head injuries’ will actually have ongoing symptoms weeks and even months later.
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Ep 211 - Semi structured interviews (CAN 9)
Long term listeners to the St Emlyn’s podcast may remember our series entitled ‘Critical Appraisal Nuggets’ (CANs). We are absolutely delighted to reinvigorate this project under the leadership of Professor Rick Body, with the episode on semi structured interviews.
In this easily digestible and succinct podcast Rick and Laura Howard go through the pros and cons of setting up semi structured interviews and how these can be used effectively in qualitative research.
In the latest episode, we cover a qualitative research technique: semi-structured interviews. Qualitative research might be out of your comfort zone: we’re generally more comfortable with quantitative measures – numbers and statistics. It’s something they have experience with, having previously published a paper exploring the impact of events that happen at work on the wellbeing of emergency physicians. This was a labour of love for Laura. Laura wrote a powerful blog about it here.
Semi-structured interviews are a great way to get the really rich data we need to understand something in greater depth. They allow us to ask ‘why?’ as well as just ‘what?’, ‘who?’ and ‘when?’. But reading qualitative research papers can be difficult when it takes us out of our comfort zone. In this CAN podcast, Laura and Rick take us through what semi-structured interviews are, why we might use them, how you design and conduct them, and they also have some pearls of wisdom about how to make transcribing them a lot less painful. By the end, we hope that you’ll feel confident with the basics of the technique. And if you want to practice your critical appraisal, why not put their study under the microscope? -
Ep 212 - February 2023 Monthly Round Up
The regular monthly round up from the St Emlyn’s blog.
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Ep 213 - Sensitivity and Specificity (CAN 10)
The latest CAN is one of our brand-new 'revision editions' -- brief podcasts aimed at covering the essentials of critical appraisal for medical students and junior doctors preparing for exams.
With the help of Gregory Yates, an academic doctor based in Manchester, this episode introduces two core concepts: sensitivity and specificity. These are two ways of thinking about the accuracy of a diagnostic test. Knowing the sensitivity and specificity of an investigation will give you a decent idea of how it should be used in the emergency department.
Sensitivity (Sn) describes the chance that a test will be positive if your patient has the condition you're testing for. Some people call it the 'true positive rate' or alternatively the positivity in disease (PID) rate. If you need a hand remembering it, you can always remember that PID is a sensitive issue.
Meanwhile, specificity (Sp) considers the chance of a test being negative if the patient doesn't have the condition you're testing for. It's the 'true negative rate' or alternatively the negativity in health (NIH) rate. There are times when we particularly need a test to have a high sensitivity. This is generally when we want to be particularly confident that a test accurately identifies everyone with the relevant condition because we really don't want to miss it. We need a high sensitivity to rule out disease. (Sn-uff it out). At other times, we need to be confident that a patient with a positive test actually has the disease - for example, if the treatment is unpleasant or involves exposing patients to risk. In that case, we want a high specificity to rule in disease. (Sp-in it in).
In this CAN, we use D-Dimer as an example of a very sensitive investigation: it’s positive in nearly 100% of cases of venous thromboembolism. Specificity describes the likelihood that the test will be negative if your patient does not have the disease. We use HbA1c as an example of a highly specific investigation: it’s rarely used in the emergency department, but if it’s elevated, we can be almost certain that the patient is diabetic. HbA1c is almost never ( -
Ep 214 - Shock from St Emlyn’s Medical School
This is the first podcast in our new series from St Emlyn’s Medical School. This is specifically aimed at healthcare students and focuses on the Medical Licensing Assessment presentations in particular but will be useful wherever you listen in the world. In this episode we discuss Shock, its physiology, potential causes and treatments.
Customer Reviews
200+
Consistently solid, evidence based support for folk in clinical practice. A leader in the field, to be congratulated on getting to 200 and having the momentum to continue for many many more. Keep it coming, please!
Excellent podcast
Fantastic podcast for emergency physicians and clinicians interested in science and critical appraisal of medical evidence
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