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Background: A patient decides to leave the hospital against medical advice. Is this an erratic eccentric behavior of the patient, or a gap in the quality of care provided by the hospital? With a significant and increasing prevalence of up to 1–2% of all hospital admissions, leaving against medical advice affects both the patient and the healthcare provider. We hereby explore this persistent problem in the healthcare system. We searched Medline and PubMed within the last 10 years, using the keywords “discharge against medical advice,” “DAMA,” “leave against medical advice,” and “AMA.” We retrospectively reviewed 49 articles in our project. Ishikawa fishbone root cause analysis (RCA) was employed to explore reasons for leaving against medical advice (AMA). This report presents the results of the RCA and highlights the consequences of discharge against medical advice (DAMA). In addition, the article explores preventive strategies, as well as interventions to ameliorate leaving AMA.

Novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID‐19) has been the focus of the medical community since its emergence in December 2019 and has already infected more than 100 million patients globally. Primarily described to cause a respiratory illness, COVID‐19 has been found to affect almost every organ system. Bradycardia is a newly recognized ramification of COVID‐19 that still has unknown prognostic value. Studies have shown an increase in the incidence of arrhythmias, cardiomyopathies, myocarditis, acute coronary syndromes, and coagulopathies in infected patients as well as an increased risk of mortality in patients with preexisting cardiovascular disease. While the pathogenesis of bradycardia in COVID‐19 may be multifactorial, clinicians should be aware of the mechanism by which COVID‐19 affects the cardiovascular system and the medication side effects which are used in the treatment algorithm of this deadly virus. There has yet to be a comprehensive review analyzing bradyarrhythmia and relative bradycardia in COVID‐19 infected patients. We aim to provide a literature review including the epidemiology, pathogenesis, and management of COVID‐19 induced bradyarrhythmia.

Delivering bad news to patients is a challenging yet impactful everyday task in clinical practice. Ideally, healthcare practitioners should receive formal training in implementing these protocols, practice in simulation environments, and real-time supervision with feedback. We aimed to investigate whether healthcare providers involved in delivering bad news have indeed received formal training to do so. We conducted a cross-sectional survey study that targeted all healthcare providers in the intensive care units of 174 institutions in 40 different countries. Participants included physicians, nurses, medical students, nursing students, pharmacists, respiratory technicians, and others. The survey tool was created, validated, and translated to the primary languages of these countries to overcome language barriers. A total of 10,106 surveys were collected. Only one third of participants indicated that they had received a formal training. Providers who had received formal training were more likely to deliver bad news than those who had not. Younger and less experienced providers tend to deliver bad news more than older, more experienced providers. The percentage of medical students who claimed they deliver bad news was comparable to that of physicians. Medical schools and post-graduate training programs are strongly encouraged to tackle this gap in medical education.

Purpose Coagulopathy is common in patients with COVID-19. The ideal approach to anticoagulation remains under debate. There is a significant variability in existing protocols for anticoagulation, and these are mostly based on sporadic reports, small studies, and expert opinion. Materials and methods This multicenter retrospective cohort study evaluated the association between anticoagulation dose and inpatient mortality among critically ill COVID-19 patients admitted to the intensive care units (ICUs) or step-down units (SDUs) of eight Beaumont Healthcare hospitals in Michigan, USA from March 10th to April 15th, 2020. Results Included were 578 patients with a median age of 64 years; among whom, 57.8% were males. Most patients (n = 447, 77.3%) received high dose and one in four (n = 131, 22.7%) received low dose anticoagulation. Overall mortality rate was 41.9% (n = 242). After adjusting for potential confounders (age, sex, race, BMI, ferritin level at hospital admission, intubation, comorbidities, mSOFA, and Padua score), administration of high anticoagulation doses at the time of ICU/SDU admission was associated with decreased inpatient mortality (OR 0.564, 95% CI 0.333–0.953, p = 0.032) compared to low dose. Conclusion Treatment with high dose anticoagulation at the time of ICU/SDU admission was associated with decreased adjusted mortality among critically ill adult patients with COVID-19.

Background Posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome (PRES) is usually a benign, yet underdiagnosed clinical condition associated with subacute to acute neurological manifestations primarily affecting white matter. PRES is reversible when recognized promptly and treated early by removal of the insulting factor; however, can lead to irreversible and life-threatening complications such as cerebral hemorrhage, cerebellar herniation, and refractory status epilepticus. Methods We utilized the National Inpatient Sample database provided by the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP-NIS) 2017 to investigate the demographic variables (age, sex, and race) for patients with PRES, concomitant comorbidities and conditions, inpatient complications, inpatient mortality, length of stay (LOS), and disposition. Results A total of 635 admissions for patients aged 18 years or older with PRES were identified. The mean age was 57.2 ± 0.6 years old with most encounters for female patients (71.7%, n = 455) and white as the most prevalent race. Half the patients in our study presented with seizures (50.1%, n = 318), sixty-three patients (9.9%) presented with vision loss, and sixty-four patients (10.1%) had speech difficulty. In addition, 45.5% of patients had hypertensive crisis (n = 289). 2.2% of hospitalizations had death as the outcome (n = 14). The mean LOS was 8.2 (±0.3) days, and the mean total charges were $92,503 (±$5758). Inpatient mortality differed between males and females (1.7% vs. 2.4%) and by race (3.6% in black vs. 1.8% in white) but was ultimately determined to be not statistically significant. Most patients who present with vision disturbance have a high risk of intracranial hemorrhage. Furthermore, end-stage renal disease, atrial fibrillation, and malignancy seemed to be linked with a very high risk of mortality. Conclusion PRES, formerly known as reversible posterior leukoencephalopathy, is a neurological disorder with variable presenting symptoms. Although it is generally a reversible condition, some patients suffer significant morbidity and even mortality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest retrospective cohort of PRES admissions that raises clinician awareness of clinical characteristics and outcomes of this syndrome.

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Case series Patients: Male, 29-year-old • Male, 37-year-old Final Diagnosis: Noncardiogenic pulmonary edema Symptoms: Dyspnea Medication: — Clinical Procedure: — Specialty: Critical Care Medicine • Pulmonology Objective: Challenging differential diagnosis Background: Naloxone remains the mainstay for the treatment of opioids overdose both in the clinical and public settings. Naloxone has been showing relative safety, leading to trivial adverdse effects which are mostly due to acute withdrawal effects, but when used in patients with known long-term addiction, it usually requires additional dosing or rapid infusion to achieve detoxification effects in a timely manner or to sustain the effects after they fade away. In some patients this has resulted in fatal adverse effects, including non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema (NCPE), which may require intensive care for those patients. Whether the higher dose is the cause has been debatable and not enough studies have looked into this subject. Case Reports: Here, we report a series of 2 cases where 2 young patients were given naloxone following opioid overdose. Both our patients required frequent dosing due to insufficient response or owing to the washout of the naloxone effect shortly after, given its short half-life. Although the administered doses were different, both patients developed the adverse effect of NCPE and required ventilator support. Conclusions: Evidence suggests that such a catastrophic adverse effect following the administration of such a critical medication, which is known to be relatively safe and is being publicized for saving lives, might limit its use and would require more attention and further studies to standardize a safe dose, limiting these life-threatening events and decreasing the need for unnecessary invasive respiratory support as well as admissions to intensive care units, which might create an additional burden on the health care system.