Bias in searching ED patients

✍ Scribed by Frank W Lavoie

• Book ID: 104311401
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 126 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1097-6760
• DOI: 10.1016/s0196-0644(05)82995-6

✦ Synopsis

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CORRESPONDENCE Bias in Searching ED Patients

To the Editor:

The article by Goetz et al, "Weapons Possession by Patients in a University Emergency Department" [January 1991;20:8-10], adds additional data to the important but extremely limited study of emergency department violence. Unfortunately, their data do not convincingly support the conclusion "that psychiatric patients were no more likely to be carrying a weapon than were medical patients." While this was true among searched patients, the searches were not conducted randomly. If one were to assume, for example, that unsearched patients carried no weapons, then the absolute percentage of weapon-carrying "psychiatric" patients would be 1.92% (60 of 3,131), versus 0.07% (24 of 35,874) for "medical" patients.