Impact of Universal Suicide Risk Screening in a Pediatric Emergency Department: A Discrete Event Simulation Approach / 대한의료정보학회지

Objectives@#The aim of this study was to use discrete event simulation (DES) to model the impact of two universal suicide risk screening scenarios (emergency department [ED] and hospital-wide) on mean length of stay (LOS), wait times, and overflow of our secure patient care unit for patients being evaluated for a behavioral health complaint (BHC) in the ED of a large, academic children’s hospital. @*Methods@#We developed a conceptual model of BHC patient flow through the ED, incorporating anticipated system changes with both universal suicide risk screening scenarios. Retrospective site-specific patient tracking data from 2017 were used to generate model parameters and validate model output metrics with a random 50/50 split for derivation and validation data. @*Results@#The model predicted small increases (less than 1 hour) in LOS and wait times for our BHC patients in both universal screening scenarios. However, the days per year in which the ED experienced secure unit overflow increased (existing system: 52.9 days; 95% CI, 51.5–54.3 days; ED: 94.4 days; 95% CI, 92.6–96.2 days; and hospital-wide: 276.9 days; 95% CI, 274.8–279.0 days). @*Conclusions@#The DES model predicted that implementation of either universal suicide risk screening scenario would not severely impact LOS or wait times for BHC patients in our ED. However, universal screening would greatly stress our existing ED capacity to care for BHC patients in secure, dedicated patient areas by creating more overflow.

Sweet’s syndrome.

Acute febrile neutrophilic dermatosis or Sweet’s syndrome (SS) is characterized by painful, erythematous plaques of rapid onset accompanied by fever. The etiology of SS is unknown and it may be associated with antecedent infections, malignancies, autoimmune diseases, drugs and vaccines, upper respiratory or gastrointestinal infection, pregnancy, inflammatory bowel disease as well as chemotherapy or idiopathic. The standard therapy for SS is systemic corticosteroids. We report a rare case of 19‑year‑old young male patient with complaint of severe ill‑defined type of pain in both jaws associated with plaques and papules on extensor surfaces of upper and lower extremities with bodyache and myalgia. Histopathological examination suggested perivascular neutrophilic infiltration with scattered eosinophils. Sweet syndrome has rare oral manifestations secondary to hematological changes. It can also present as a paraneoplastic syndrome (malignancy‑associated form of condition, which is most commonly related to acute myelogenous leukemia), which leads to poor prognosis and thus it requires careful examination, early diagnosis and long‑term follow‑up.