Here’s a set of action cards I use in my small rural ED – rather than have experienced nurses disappear from the resus room in order to get details of how to make up an isoprenaline infusion, I can hand off these small action cards (kept in a pamphlet holder at the head of resus bay ED) to even the least experienced – the details allow them to do what is needed for these important but infrequently performed tasks.
Airway action cards
Circulation action cards
Infusion action cards
Other Procedures action cards
Perhaps the best talk on ‘making things happen’ from Cliff Reid in Sydney
This useful paper highlights the Characteristics of Effective Teams – is YOUR ED team doing all it can?
Here is a list of useful EM links for Rural Doctors; check out also the EM-Crit Care blog roll from lifeinthefastlane.com
EMERGENCY MEDICINE
BoringEM – tackles the EM topics that others fear. Like constipation.
Broome Docs – rural doc Casey Parker on a mission to bring “quality care, everywhere”
Crashing Patient – a webtext of ED / Critical Care
EMCrit – Scott Weingart “Bringing Upstairs Care, Downstairs”
Emergency Medicine Ireland – doesn’t need a translator and rumoured to supply free Guiness
Emergency Medicine & Paediatric EM – good paeds EM resource
Emergency Medicine Tutorials – for Australasian trainees, useful for rural docs
Guidelines Database – not surprisingly, a list of guidelines
Integrated Cardiovascular Clinical Network (SA) – South Australia’s excellent cardiac support service
Intensive Care Network – useful for those with a critical care bent
Intranasal Drug Delivery – does what it says on the can
Lifeinthefastlane.com – the ‘go to’ site for most Australasian EM FOAMed
MDCalc – excellent resource for online calculations – PERC, Wells’ etc
Number Needed to Treat – useful database on interventions and their NNT. Recommended.
Resus.Medical Education – from master resuscitationist, HEMS doc & nice guy Dr Cliff Reid, NSW
Sceptics Guide to Emergency Medicine – question everything, trust no one
Emergency Trauma Management Course – FOAMed goodness, teaches the stuff they don’t teach elsewhere
ORTHOPAEDICS & TRAUMA
Australian Trauma Society – it’s a club about trauma down under
OrthoInfo – takes us beyond the simplistic “there is a bone, I must fix it”
PAEDIATRIC & OBSTETRIC
Royal Children’s Hospital – Clinical Practice Guidelines
Royal Manchester Hospital PICU calculator
The Royal Women’s Hospital (Australia)
ANAESTHETICS IN ED
Anestricks.com – cool anaesthetic tricks that aren’t in the books
PRE HOSPITAL MEDICINE
A Day in the Life of a BASICS Doc – BASICS docs adding expertise to ambulance and retrieval scenarios
Auckland HEMS – useful site, especially their sim scenarios
MedSTAR SA – pretty red suits and an excellent retrieval service for rural South Australia
PHARM (prehospital & retrieval medicine) – from former rural doctor Dr Minh le Cong of RFDS QLD
RESUS.ME – from Cliff Reid in Sydney. Just don’t give propofol in his ED for a critical patient RSI
RFDS Resources for Health Professionals – excellent resource for rural doctors
SCAN CRIT – tall, blonde and not afraid to let it hang out in the sauna, these Norse Gods bring EBM to FOAMed
SYDNEY HEMS – excellent resources with many of their SOPs and Manuals applicable to rural doctors
More submissions welcomed…
Rural Doctors Net 
[…] action cards for a couple of years (some are available via the RESOURCES section of this site or RURALDOCTORS.NET. Most of these were designed for handing off to nursing staff in the rural ED, partly to mitigate […]