Clearing the Patient with suicidal ideation in the emergency department, can be extremely difficult. The confounders of alcohol and drugs, unstated intent, the experience of the psychiatric liaison staff, the busyness of the emergency department and time pressures, all can play a major role.
In this discussion at EMCORE, Dr Chris Stapelberg, psychiatrist and I discuss two cases. We talk about risk factors, ability to capture the patient that is high risk, ‘clinical’ sobriety, urine drug screens and more. We remove aspects of the history and see what effect this has.
This is one of my favourite EMCORE discussions.
