Background

Emergency physicians frequently treat patients who present with acute neurological emergencies. These patients require timely diagnostics and directed therapies in the setting of acute illness and injury. FERNE has developed eight clinical cases into FERNE's "Brain Injury Course: Treating ED Patients with CNS Illness & Injury." This three hour session is an abbreviated version of a day-long fellowship that will be offered to interested EM residency faculty and senior residents in the near future.

The education efforts of this program are guided by four principles:

1. Education should be case-based and clinically relevant.
2. The learning process should be interactive and interesting.
3. Recommendations should be based on evidence and guidelines.
4. Medical diagnostics and therapies should be provided in the context of a "procedure".

With respect to item four, above, it has been stated that emergency physicians take a surgeon's approach to medical emergencies. This is an excellent approach to educating physicians in diagnosing and treating neurological emergency patients. These lectures will focus on what steps must take place in order to complete a necessary "procedure" so as to correctly diagnose and treat these patients and improve patient outcome.

This session will rapidly define key clinical questions, provide key learning concepts, and discuss "procedures" that relate to these neurological emergencies. Additionally, an audience response system will be used to query the audience as to what they might do if they were treating these patients in their ED. All are welcome to attend!

Learning Objectives
Upon program completion, participants should be able to:

• Describe how an effective ED neurological assessment can be conducted in patients with neurological emergencies.
• Review neuroimages that will assist the ED physician in making critical neurological diagnoses.
• Demonstrate procedures and protocols that will allow ED physicians to optimally treat patients with neurological emergencies.
• Develop key learning points related to the acute ED diagnosis and management of these eight emergent CNS diagnoses.