Resources

There are an endless number of resources available to help you practice in ED, but some pull their weight more than others. Different resources are helpful for different questions, and I’ve tried to compile a short list of the best available.

CIAP (Clinical Information Access Portal) 

For NSW doctors – this is the entry point for NSW doctors to access many different online resources through NSH health. You can access this from home if you use your work login as well.

eTG – electronic Therapeutic Guidelines

This should be your first stop if you want to know what the right medication is for a particular illness (particularly antibiotics) including timing and dosages. There are guides for the correct prescription of gentamicin and vancomycin as well which always cause headaches for newcomers. There is also some basic information on safety in pregnancy and breastfeeding.

AMH and AMH Children’s – Australian Medicines Handbook

AMH is helpful for medication adverse effects, for knowing how many tablets in a pack for prescription and for understanding ballpark dosages. eTG is usually better for dosages but the Children’s edition can be quite helpful for dosages in bubs. I end up referring to AMH whenever I write a script when patients are discharging home.

UpToDate

I find this excellent for my own learning outside of work but rarely helpful on shift. It’s exhaustive in summarising the research on a particular topic and is great for reading up on a complex patient after the fact.

Drugs in Pregnancy and Lactation (Briggs)

This is a detailed database with a collection of evidence of the safety data we have about individual drugs, helpful in a pregnant patient requiring admission for a different reason.

ACI - Agency of Clinical Innovation

This is quite a robust collection of Emergency-specific resources and well worth looking through.

Clinical Tools - to help focus your assessments at work (not unlike this blog) though I do not use these much myself.

Emergency Patient Factsheets - Enormously helpful when discharging patients. They increase health literacy and decrease representation rates.

Emergency Procedures - Now in app form, this free resource has videos and step by step instructions on common important procedures in Emergency

RCH - Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne

Guidelines - These guidelines are essential when treating children, many of these guidelines are endorsed by several health services in Australia, not just Victoria.

Factsheets - Another essential alongside almost every child’s discharge summary. Please try to give one out with every discharge.

MD Calc

This app and website has an exhaustive collection of evidence based clinical tools to help your decision-making process in Emergency. I regularly put the results of these in my notes to support my assessments. Some common ones I use are:

• Wells’ for PE

• PERC

• Wells’ for DVT

• HEART score for low risk chest pain

• Curb 65 and SMART-COP for pneumonia

• Kocher for septic arthritis in kids

• SIRS and Sepsis

• TWIST for testicular torsion

• Canadian C-spine and Canadian CT head

• CHA2DS2-VASc for Atrial Fibrillation

These are by no means the only useful ones but some of these are worth favouriting.

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