Procedural Sedation in a UAE Emergency Department: Encouraging Informed Decision-Making Through a Patient Information...

Area of Science:

• Emergency Medicine
• Anesthesiology
• Patient Safety

Background:

• Procedural sedation is crucial in emergency departments (ED) for pain and anxiety management during procedures.
• Benchmarking ED practices against international standards ensures high-quality patient care.
• Lack of standardized patient information can hinder understanding and adherence to sedation protocols.

Purpose of the Study:

• To benchmark current procedural sedation practices in a tertiary referral hospital ED against Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) guidelines.
• To identify areas of strength and areas for improvement in procedural sedation delivery.
• To develop and implement a multilingual procedural sedation information leaflet for patients and their carers.

Main Methods:

• A retrospective review of 100 electronic healthcare records for procedural sedation from January 2019 to August 2022.
• Audited 14 criteria based on RCEM and ACEP guidelines for procedural sedation.
• Developed and translated a procedural sedation leaflet into six languages (Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam).

Main Results:

• Ten out of 14 audited criteria demonstrated full compliance (90-100%).
• One criterion was partially compliant (80-89%), and three were non-compliant (≤79%).
• A multilingual procedural sedation leaflet was successfully created and distributed.

Conclusions:

• The ED demonstrated strong performance in procedural sedation, meeting international standards in most areas.
• The audit identified a need for written patient discharge information, addressed by the new multilingual leaflet.
• Physician re-training focused on documentation and adherence to safe procedural sedation practices.