Speaker: Aarti Sarwal, MD, FAAN, FNCS, FCCM
Aarti Sarwal, MD, FAAN, FNCS, FCCM: Hello, I'm Aarti Sarwal, the Social Media Editor of Critical Care Medicine here with my picks from the November issue of CCM. The upcoming issue is rich with several articles, especially on sepsis, ranging from one on probiotic associated central line infections, a project by Ofoma and colleagues to create a sepsis-related hospital capability index and its relationship to sepsis mortality and the SCCM IDSA guidelines on evaluation of new fever in adult ICU patients. There were two other articles that stood out for me. One by Cifra and colleagues that reports on prevalence and characteristics of diagnostic error in the first week of pediatric critical care admission. They pooled data from four academic tertiary level PICUs and used a revised version of the Safer Diagnosis instrument to detect missed opportunities in diagnosis. A nice methodological advancement in increasing patient safety. You must check it out. Another article by Vaishali Mittal and the group analyzed transcribed conversations from goals of care discussions between clinicians and surrogates to delineate the types of hedge language used. Their project attempts to distinguish between using vague language and expressing uncertainty. A thought invoking editorial by Dominique Piquette asks a key question. Can this linguistic distinction impact shared decision making or outcomes in critical care? We'll need more research for that. For more articles, please follow us on X or Facebook. Goodbye.
