Lessons Learned From ICEM 2010 (Part G): 22 Emergency Medicine-Related Research Ideas and Tips Gained From ICEM 2010

22 Emergency Medicine-Related Research Ideas and Tips Drawn From ICEM 2010

1) Conduct a study to look into the influence of economic recession and inflation on Malaysian patients’ preferences of medical treatment (public healthcare including emergency department facilities versus private healthcare facilities).

2) As a paradigm shift, carry out more preventive medicine in emergency medicine to truncate diseases early in the course of illness.

3) Conduct studies to look into the effectiveness of empowering patients and family or engaging them in a form of partnership in patient management. Common example: mild head injury advice on discharge – does it reduce the rate of admission without compromising on care?

4) Conduct study to look into not just bystander CPR rate of your community, but also bystander First aid rate. Pick specific life saving first aid interventions – e.g. bleeding control prior to arrival to hospital

5) Especially in times of economic recession, sophisticated technology is not always the answer to good emergency care. Conduct studies that are simple, cost-effective and yet have profound clinical benefit for your community.

6) Conduct study to look into public access AEDs in your community. How many of the public places and buildings have AEDs? Are the staffs working in that particular place with AEDs know how to use them?

7) Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate

8) Innovate, innovate, innovate…... often research methodologies can be designed by giving existence researches a “tweak” to suit them into your setting and patient population.

9) Be creative, as no idea is just too crazy for innovation.

10) In order to generate a research idea, one should always an inquisitive mind. One should always ask “Why?” “Why not?” For example, “why should treatment X better than treatment Y?”

11) There are many areas or domains of research one can embark on, among which: Cellular level, organs and system, disease process, patients, family, organization, hospital staffs, treatment modalities – drugs, surgery, etc, diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, screening, communication, attitude.

12) Translate research done in one area into another area related to emergency medicine

13) Do validation studies of newly formulated clinical prediction rules, scoring systems, etc

14) If a drug or a mode of treatment works in one group, try postulating and ask whether the mode of treatment will work well in another group or not; e.g. adults vs pediatrics, prehospital vs hospital settings, etc.

15) Do studies on incidences of clinical errors, misdiagnosis, etc.

16) Ask advice and be willing to share ideas. Worrying that someone else may steal your research ideas is a recipe for failure and disaster.

17) Be pragmatic. If you want to a study on rare diseases, first of all, ask yourself, how often do you see these cases? Can you finish the study on time?

18) Get your biostatistician involved early in the course of the research! Good, valid research depends more on getting the methodology right rather than towards the end of research completion, when the data has been collected.

19) Do not become a “p-value worshipper”! Remember that p-value can be manipulated by increasing the sample size, but the clinical significance cannot be manipulated

20) How about a study on the influences on TV medical shows and dramas such as ER, House, etc on the choices of future career?

21) As the world progresses, more and more psychiatric cases may be seen in emergency departments. Psychiatric emergencies or mental health is an evolving research area in emergency medicine. Yet, this is one area where not many researches have been done. Bear in mind that ethical issues and getting consent may be challenging in such area.

22) Studies from western countries are not always applicable within the Asian context because Asian population may have different genetic make-up, with different disease manifestation, different socio-economic background, different infectious disease patterns, etc.

I have compiled the entire series of my "scribbled" notes during the talks I attended in ICEM 2010 into a brief report. This report will also be submitted to the university besides the handouts of my own presentations.

You may download the entire series as an ebook. Click here to download in Scribd.

The content in this ebook may be freely distributed for non-commercial, educational purposes provided that nothing is added or removed, including this copyright notice.

If you are placing the ebook link in your site, please provide a link back to the URL of Emergency Medicine Blog at http://emergencymedic.blogspot.com/

For any other queries, please contact cksheng74@yahoo.com


A Brief Report On Lessons I Learned From Selected Talks In ICEM 2010 and 22 Emergency Medicine-Related Research Ideas and Tips Gained From This Conference by Dr. Chew Keng Sheng is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.