Safe to send home? Discharge risk assessment in the emergency department
Contributing GEDC Faculty
Dr. Chris Carpenter is dual-board certified in Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine and is Professor in Emergency Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. His funded research interests include diagnostics, dementia, falls prevention, and implementation science. He is on the Society of Academic Emergency Medicine Board of Directors as well as the American College of Emergency Physicians Clinical Policy Committee. He is also Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Academic Emergency Medicine, Associate Editor of both Annals of Internal Medicine’s ACP Journal Club and the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. He co-led the collaboration to develop the American College of Emergency Physician/American Geriatrics Society Geriatric Emergency Department Guidelines As well as the International Standards for Reporting of Implementation Research (StaRI) reporting guidelines. He is also faculty for Emergency Medical Abstracts and Best Evidence in Emergency Medicine courses, as well as a contributor to Skeptics Guide to Emergency Medicine and Sketchy EBM.
Introduction
An 88‐year‐old man who lives alone attends ED with cough, weakness and dyspnoea, which you diagnose as viral bronchitis. As an avid reader of the Acute Geriatric Series in Emergency Medicine Australasia, you identify that he scores 6 on the Clinical Frailty Scale, that is, he is moderately frail (needing help with all outside activities and with keeping house). You recognize that he is at increased risk in the short term if discharged, and wonder if he will be safer if admitted?
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