Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Abstracts in Urgent Care – June 2023

Click Here to download the article PDF Ivan Koay MBChB, MRCS, FRNZCUC, MD Immersive Virtual Reality Use in Reducing Pediatric Procedural Anxiety Take-home point: Immersive virtual reality (IVR) use in pediatric patients significantly improved pain and anxiety compared with the control group. Citation: Wong C, Choi K. Effects of an immersive virtual reality intervention on pain and anxiety among pediatric patients undergoing venipuncture: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA Netw Open. 2023;6(2):e230001. Relevance: Poorly managed procedural …

Youth Concussions May Be More Common than We Thought

More U.S. high school students self-report having had a concussion than is reflected in data from hospitals and school systems, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 15% of participants in the CDC’s latest Youth Risk Behavior Study (YRBS) say they have experienced at least one concussion related to sports or physical activity over a 1-year period. That prevalence, equating to 2.5 million children, is higher than what’s …

Concussion Management in Urgent Care: A Primer for Implementation

Urgent message: Sports-related concussions are particularly dangerous injuries due to their complex nature and difficulties associated with diagnostic and return-to-play decisions. Some of the most commonly employed assessment tools have been shown to be unreliable, leading to misdiagnoses. Guidelines for selecting more effective concussion assessment instruments and the use of such tests in urgent care settings are here suggested as an optimal framework for improved care. Len Lecci, PhD, MA IntroductionMillions of adults, adolescents, and …

Concussion Recommendations Continue to Evolve

New guidelines for caring for young athletes with concussions favor movement over rest more than previous recommendations. The advisory, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, suggests that getting the patient to start moving—slowly, with gradual increases—may shorten recovery time. The authors are very clear that this does not mean returning to the field of play right away, however. Rather, where patients have been instructed to rest until symptoms completely disappear previously, there now …

Concussion in the Urgent Care Center: From the Sideline to Your Bottom Line

URGENT MESSAGE: Increased awareness of concussion risks in organized sports creates an opportunity for urgent care centers to offer concussion education and treatment for student-athletes. James Nawalaniec is a first-year medical student at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Concussions can be difficult to diagnose and easy to ignore, although they pose a very serious threat to brain health and function—especially if more than one concussion is sustained within a short period …

New Study: Youth Sports Injuries Always in Season

Visits to the emergency room for sports injuries in children between the ages of 5 and 18 years rose every year from 2001 to 2013, with three quarters of those injuries attributed to football, soccer, baseball, and basketball, according to new data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. All told, there were nearly half a million emergent injuries in 100 hospital emergency departments during the study period—translating to an …

Abstracts in Urgent Care: March, 2014

Reconsidering antibiotics for COPD exacerbation Key point: Prescribing antibiotics to patients with mild-to-moderate COPD exacerbations who have no change in sputum probably is unnecessary. Citation: Miravitlles M, Moragas A, Hernandez S, et al. Is it possible to identify exacerbations of mild to moderate COPD that do not require antibiotic treatment? Chest. 2013;144(5): 1571-1577. The decision to prescribe antibiotics to patients with moderate to mild-to-moderate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbations is usually based on increased …