Fostering cultural competence in higher education institutions is essential, particularly in training future health care workers to care for diverse populations. The opportunity to explore techniques to address diversity and cultural competence at a new medical school was undertaken by a multidisciplinary team of librarians, faculty, staff, and medical students. From 2011 to 2015, the team sponsored a voluntary programming series to promote cultural competence and raise awareness of health care disparities for the medical school. Thirteen events were hosted with 562 participants across all. This approach to diversity proved effective and could be adapted in any higher education setting.

IntroductionInsufficient attention has been directed towards urosepsis. Notably, no protocols or clinical decision rules currently exist outlining the appropriate use of imaging in uroseptic patients. The primary objective of our study was to retrospectively evaluate uroseptic emergency department (ED) patients who underwent abdominal imaging, to report the proportion of patients with imaging findings necessitating emergent surgical consultation. MethodsWe retrospectively identified 1142 patients ≥ 18 years of age that presented to the ED from January 2009 to December 2012 with ICD9 code indicative of urosepsis. All included patients underwent ED-ordered abdominal computerized tomography (CT) or retroperitoneal ultrasound (US). Imaging and urinalysis (UA) results were categorized. We report proportions with odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals. ResultsOf 1142 patients, we excluded 80 for neg UA, 167 for < 2 SIRS (systemic inflammatory response syndrome), 320 for positive blood cultures, and 37 for incomplete data. This yielded 538 patients which the authors reviewed the results of the CT or US to determine the proportion who required emergent surgical consultation and who underwent surgical or interventional procedure. There were 243 (45%) that had CT or US results that necessitated emergency surgical consultation, of those 180 (33%) underwent surgical or interventional procedure. Similar rates of emergency surgical consultation occurred when sub-divided by positive versus equivocal UA, with 43% and 47%, respectively. ConclusionsForty-five percent of our abdominally imaged urosepsis cohort had imaging findings that necessitated emergent surgical consultation, with a similar proportion in the subset with positive versus equivocal UA. The utility of abdominal imaging in this population should be studied prospectively.

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