Doing Research in Emergency and Acute Care: Making Order Out of Chaos

A practical guide to understanding and navigating the unique challenges faced by physicians and other professionals who wish to undertake research in the ED or other acute care setting.

Focusing on the hyper-acute and acute care environment and fulfilling two closely-related needs:

1) the need for even seasoned researchers to understand the specific logistics and issues of doing research in the ED; and 2) the need to educate clinically active physicians in research methodology.

This new text is not designed to be a complex, encyclopedic resource, but instead a concise, easy-to-read resource designed to convey key “need-to-know” information within a comprehensive framework. Aimed at the busy brain, either as a sit-down read or as a selectively-read reference guide to fill in knowledge gaps, chapters are short, compartmentalized, and are used strategically throughout the text in order to introduce and frame concepts. This format makes it easy - and even entertaining - for the research novice to integrate and absorb completely new (and typically dry) material.

The textbook addresses aspects of feasibility, efficiency, ethics, statistics, safety, logistics, and collaboration in acute research. Overall, it grants access for the seasoned researcher seeking to learn about acute research to empathically integrate learning points into his or her knowledge base.

As the ED is the primary setting for hyper-acute and acute care, and therefore a prime site for related clinical trial recruitment and interventions, the book presents specific logistical research challenges that researchers from any discipline, including physicians, research nurse coordinators, study monitors, or industry partners, need to understand in order to succeed.

Kama Z. Guluma, MD, is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and the Research Education Coordinator in the UC San Diego Health Systems Department of Emergency Medicine. He is a board-certified and clinically active Emergency Physician with over 10 years of hands on experience in clinical and basic science research, specifically with regards to acute stroke. He has served -- and currently serves as a Principal Investigator in NIH? funded clinical trials, and has published both clinical and pre-clinical research manuscripts. He has been a member of the NIH Stroke Progress Review Group, a national panel convened by the National Institutes of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS) to identify and outline national research priorities in acute stroke. He is also a reviewer for the Annals of Emergency Medicine, Internal and Emergency Medicine, and the Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Michael P. Wilson, PhD, MD, is an Attending Physician in the UC San Diego Health Systems Department of Emergency Medicine, as well as Director of the Department of Emergency Medicine Behavioral Emergencies Research lab. He is a board certified and clinically active Emergency Physician, and brings a "cross-trained" perspective, having received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience. He has published numerous articles on both Emergency Medicine research and behavioral emergencies, sits on numerous journal editorial boards, and is a reviewer for both the Journal of Emergency Medicine and Western Journal of Emergency Medicine.

Stephen Hayden, MD, is a Professor in the UC San Diego Health Systems Department of Emergency Medicine, is the previous Director of Residency Training and currently serves as Dean of Graduate Medical Education. He is a board-certified and clinically active Emergency Physician, has lectured nationally on evidence-based medicine, and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Emergency Medicine.