The impact of horse-related injuries presenting to the Emergency Department and patient-reported outcomes measures: A two-phase cohort study

Children and adults who experience injury from horses-related accidents can be at risk of severe trauma due to injury mechanism, i.e., falling from, being kicked, hit, trampled, or crushed by a horse. Despite a low incident rate of injury in horse-riding and equestrian sports when an accident occurs there is a high-risk of the injury being severe due to the mechanism. Injury risk from horses has been found among experienced horse riders and handlers to increase with frequency of interaction and over time.

There is a lack of current evidence on the impact from all mechanisms of horse-related injuries experienced by children and adults treated in the emergency department. And the examination of health-related recovery of children and adults after discharge from the emergency department and hospital has been rarely researched. The aim of this study is to examine horse-related injury and recovery from injury among children and adults.

This project will be conducted in two phases, a review of health care data from emergency department presentations including all types of horse-related injury from 2018 to 2024. The second phase of the study will be conducted prospectively from July 2025 to June 2026 to examine how children (eight-years-and-above) and adults have recovered from injury. Patients (or parent/guardian) will consent for health care data to be collected and for follow-up by research staff after discharge from the emergency department or hospital at three-and six-months, this will include completion of a health-related quality of life questionnaire.

Application of the HEART score to the “intermediate risk” patient group may help identify those who are at lowest risk of cardiac events, therefore, not benefit from further testing

Chest pain is a very common presentation to emergency departments and has wide variety of causes including life threatening conditions such as a heart attack and benign causes such as a muscular strain. Often the biggest challenge is to appropriately identify an individual's risk of suffering a heart attack, while ensuring that the harms associated with potential over-investigation are minimised. This requires an efficient and systematic risk stratification process, and has been the focus of a lot of research. Currently, in Queensland the approach to this challenge is to use a blood test called troponin, along with ECG, to determine an individuals level of risk. This allows a large number of patients to be discharged quickly, but also results in many people falling into an intermediate risk group. The Sunshine Coast Health Service has recently started using the internationally validated HEART Score to further risk stratify this intermediate risk group, to identify those who do not require further testing and those that are at a level of risk that do require further investigation. These patients are then seen in a rapid access chest pain clinic. This study assesses the safety of this pathway which is unique in the way it combines the two approaches, and in that it assessing patients who are intermediate risk by HEART Score in an outpatient setting when normally they would be admitted to hospital.

SWAMPED: Linking best practice workforce models to Emergency Department funding

The aims of this research are to link best practice ED workforce models to available ED funding under an activity-based funding (ABF), while contributing to the development of an improved national activity and outcome-based ED funding model. This research will identify the current status of funding of EDs, identify and critically appraise models for funding of EDs and identify the workforce implications of those funding models and propose a State-wide ED clinical workforce framework.