EVIDENCE-BASED EMERGENCY MEDICINE

WORKING GROUP

MINUTES 4/4/00

Present: Peter Dayan, Barney Eskin, Phil Hubel and Peter Wyer

Guest: Michael Brown, Michigan State University

The meeting was called to order at 7:10 PM by Peter Wyer

OLD BUSINESS

Minutes of the March meeting were reviewed and approved.

Y2K EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES

NYAM WORKSHOP 2000

The workshop will be held October 2-5, 2000. We plan on advertising nationally, starting with a free posting in the Annals of Emergency Medicine in May. This will be followed by distribution of a notice to the major listserves, including EMED-L and PED-EM-L as well as advertising in Emergency Medicine News.

Discussion followed as to the target audience. Although attendings from both academic programs and non-teaching departments will be invited, we favor reserving at least half of the slots for academic programs. As we did last year, the deadline for receipt of applications, including tuition payment, will be June 21st; and the last day for unconditional refunds will be August 15th.

Although packets will be sent in advance of the workshop, they will be kept as small as possible and the modules included will be the basic ones, namely diagnosis, therapy and overview. Posting some of the materials on the website would obviate the need for large mailings. It was also suggested that for the first 1 or 2 tutorial sessions, the participants be encouraged to use the sample modules. In addition, use of the teaching scripts being developed by the group lead by Peter Wyer was discussed. Barney Eskin offered that one of his colleagues, Dennis Cochrane, may be videotaping a Evidence-Based Medicine journal club activity and that a condensed version of the video could be distributed to participants to familiarize them with the format of the workshop and help them prepare for it.

PEDIATRIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE FELLOWS' WORKSHOP

Peter Dayan is continuing with plans for the workshop August 17 and 18 at Columbia University. Peter Wyer will be the cotutor with Peter Dayan. Plans were made to invite John Brennan (Livingston, NJ), who has attended the McMaster workshop, as a tutor-trainee. The American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Pediatric Emergency Medicine has given $1600 to fund the workshop.

WEBSITE UPDATE

Gloria Kuhn has reorganized the listing of the rational clinical exam series to facilitate clinical use. She has given us permission to post this revised listing on our website.

We are also updating the description of our listing and identification on the website.




BIG CAT PROJECT

Peter Dayan has been discussing CATs with Victor Montori at Rochester. This discussion centers around the notion that CATs are best used just as local tools intended to help individual programs keep track of their EBM journal club activities and should not really be used for general dissemination. However, Peter proposed an alternative format similar to a structured overview in which a single clinical question would be investigated, with the title, "Systematic Clinical Question Review."

SITE VISITS

Peter Wyer has been invited to a site visit at LIJ. He will be talking about practice guidelines and plans on meeting there afterward with attendees of previous workshops. He also proposed we arrange a site visit to Lincoln Hospital as well.

FUNDRAISING/TREASURER'S REPORT

As a result of his planned site visit to LIJ, Peter Wyer has negotiated a $300 contribution to our group from there. Barney Eskin reported that the Emergency Medicine Associates Research Foundation (NJ) will again make a $400 contribution this year. We are awaiting further discussions with Pfizer and hope that they will also repeat the contribution that they made last year.

The next monthly meeting will be held at the NY Academy of Medicine, 1215 Fifth Avenue (at 103rd St.) at

5:15 PM on Tuesday, May 2nd. Food will be available. The meeting will be followed at 6:30 by a presentation by Peter Wyer, entitled, "Frontiers of Evidence-based Informatics and Research: A Demo of the Centres for Health Evidence Web Site."



There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 8:25 PM.

Respectfully submitted



Barney Eskin