News and reviews

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Critical decision making

August 21, 2014
For those of you who don't know him, Dr. Scott Weingart is a New York based emergency and critical care physician. He is a powerhouse of education and training in this specialist area, writing books and articles and speaking at top end conferences and workshops. He is someone I have gotten to know through various contacts and consider him a friend.



Scott runs his own site, called EM Crit, which is a fantastic resource, choc full of everything critical care, from procedures to cutting edge concepts through to the more mundane aspects of the specialty. He has a talent for getting really interesting and experienced people on to his podcast to discuss topics. over the past year or so, there has been a vogue for exploring the cognitive and behavioural aspects of acute care medicine and decision making (See some of the links below). Last week Scott posted a talk by a guy called Mike Lauria, who sounds really down to earth but is clearly a thoughtful practitioner. There is more about him on Scott's site,so I won't repeat it here.


Mike Lauria (@ResusPadawan)

The talk is essentially about critical decision making in high stakes environments. It is drawn from Mike's experience in the U.S. military and flight para-medicine and it is fantastic. Mike elegantly weaves all of the topics that I've heard discussed regarding performance psychology for clinicians into a single presentation. He covers everything from Boyd's OODA loop and Kahneman's "Thinking fast and slow" through to strategies for cognitive unloading, building in trajectory rally points and stress inoculation. It is a work of art and there are very practical lessons and pointers to take away and use straight away.

So, enough from me, go and check it out now - EM Crit: MotR – Mike Lauria on “Making the Call”


Other critical care performance psychology resources

Resus M.E. - Making Things Happen
Resus M.E. - On chicken bombs and muppets
EM Crit Podcast 90 – Mind of the Resuscitationist Series: Cliff Reid’s Own the Resus Room
Life In The Fast Lane - All Doctors are Jackasses

 

Cases from the races at SMACC GOLD

August 7, 2014
Back in March I posted a podcast that I recorded at the smaccGOLD conference with Northern Irish anaesthetist and motorbike race doc, John Hinds, and Aussie anaesthetist and motorsport doc, Brent May. The talk that John had been invited to SMACC to give has been released on the other site that I'm involved with, the Intensive Care Network. The pro-con debate between John and Brent on the usefulness or not of cricoid pressure in airway management is also available on the ICN site.



John's "Cases...
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Medical response at Formula 1: Insider

May 21, 2014


For anyone who doesn't already know, Dr Gary Hartstein, the previous FIA Medical Rescue Co-ordinator who rode shotgun with Alan van der Merwe in the Mercedes AMG C63 station wagon at the back of the grid for each F1 start, has moved on from mere tweeting and now writes his own blog, A Former F1 Doc Writes.


More recently, he has started a series of posts on how a medical response to a racing incident is articulated. The posts give an insight into how the process is managed at the very highest l...

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C-spine collar glory days

May 21, 2014


Sorry about this. I had planned to put up a post on the devolving role of the semi-rigid cervical spine collar two weeks ago. However, the more I read about it, the more I wrote and I ended up with a five page document. Waaay too long for a blog post!

So what I'm going to do instead is submit the original piece to a journal as an opinion piece and see if I can get it published. If that happens I'll put up a link to the article. In the meantime, as it may take some time to get through the edito...

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Concussion biomarkers - The new brain 'troponins'?

April 2, 2014


My thanks to Rik Hagen for the heads up on this article on a trial of brain injury biomarkers; specifically neuron-specific enolase (NSE), S100 calcium-binding protein (S100-B) nad total tau protein (T-tau).

Now, I can hear your eyelids closing already, but stick with me on this because it may be an indicator of future directions, both in terms of how we approach concussion in sport and perhaps for the level of expectation that is placed on the abilities of medics providing cover at sporting e...

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Podcast 7 released

April 2, 2014
Last week I put up a podcast recorded at the smaccGOLD conference with John Hinds (Irish Anesthetist, Intensivist, Prehospitalist and Road Racing doctor) and Brent May (Australian Anesthetist, Prehospitalist and Motorsport doctor). We discussed the hazards of providing medical cover at long distance events, the differences between circuit and closed public road motorbike events and some injury patterns to be aware of.

Podcast 7 - Irish road racing and Australian circuits with John Hinds and Br...
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Lessons learned at the Melbourne F1 GP for the 2014 season

March 24, 2014
  

Formula One has made some dramatic changes for the 2014 season, which are all well documented in the motorsport media, with some creating a fair bit of criticism. I thought we'd take a look at some of the elements that have a bearing on the provision of rescue and medical services. These may change during the year and more may come to light. Feel free to add to this post in the comments section below.



First up, the engine isn't an engine anymore. It's a powertrain or power unit. See this Rac...

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Rollcage Medic launches the Motorsport Medicine & Rescue Google community

January 19, 2014
Medical education, as with everything, is evolving and the progress of the online medical resources has been remarkable. Starting out as a hodge-podge of niche newsgroups and individual blogs, the FOAMed community has galvanised itself into a broad range of blog sites, content communities, journal clubs, podcasts and even conferences (think SMACC and Bedside Critical Care). Individuals and groups are finding ways to shape Web 2.0 resources to the benefit of promulgating medical education in n...
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The Rollcage Medic site gets an overhaul

January 19, 2014
The Rollcage Medic site has been in and out of the pit lane in something over 3.2 seconds and had a complete redesign to clean it up and streamline it. It's been a lot of hard work and I hope it will prove to be worth the effort.



The navigation should be quicker and the url at the top of the page should be more consistent. You'll notice the older blog posts have two sets of dates as a result of the reconfiguration; the older date is the original post date and the newer one is the date on whic...
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Formula 4 comes to Australia in 2014

January 19, 2014
Posted by Matthew Mac Partlin on Sunday, December 15, 2013 


Formula 4 has been confirmed as the new stepping stone in progression in open-wheel race car competition in Australia. So here is a summary of the key items of this new formula, with a focus on the elements that impact on medical and rescue provision.

The aim is to keep cost to a minimum, to encourage young talent to progress through the ranks to Formula 3 and on to Formula 1. That doesn't mean it will be particularly c...
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