Welcome to the Emergency Medicine Cases podcast.

I'm your host, Dr. Anton Hellman, bringing you Canada's brightest minds in emergency medicine from EMC studios in Toronto.

EM cases is part of SREMI, Schwartz-Risman Emergency Medicine Institute, the nonprofit organization dedicated to improving EM care through research and

education. The opinions expressed on this podcast are intended for information and education

purposes only and should not be used to diagnose treat or prevent any medical condition,

nor should they be used as a substitute for medical advice and qualified practicing physician.

All right, so we see patients with syncope or near syncope in the ED like all the time, right?

An entire one-third of the

Canadian population has had a synchaple episode, but of course only a tiny fraction of them

have a serious underlying cause. In times of ED overcrowding an access block, we need to know

which patients are safe to go home and which patients should be admitted. And for decades,

there have been no solid answers to this simple question. Now, in Canada, we admit about 15%

of all comers who present with syncope, and if they're over 80 years old, we admit about 60%

of them. My guess is that those numbers are probably a bit higher in the U.S.

So this podcast with world-renowned EM speaker, David Carr, is going to answer one simple

question that requires a big, long answer. Which patients are safe to send home and which

patients should we be worried about.

So to answer this question, we're going to dig deep into the ED evaluation of syncope

and drive home the point that the history is the single most important part of your evaluation.

We'll give you the key clinical clues to dig out in taking your history. We're going to give you the best approach to ECG interpretation, and we're going to look at the value of decision tools in risk stratifying these patients. So welcome back to EMK's Dr. Carr. It's great to have you here, man. Yeah, it's fantastic to be here. And I think we need to say what here is, which is I'm sitting beside you in studio. And it's great to see you. And it's great not to be

recording from my basement, but from your studio. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's the first in-person

podcast at EMC Studios I've done since COVID began. So it's exciting. We're going to talk about syncope and history taking.

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