TY - JOUR T1 - Emergencies in general practice: could checklists support teams in stressful situations? JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 304 LP - 305 DO - 10.3399/bjgp20X709373 VL - 70 IS - 695 AU - Paul Greig AU - Anne Maloney AU - Helen Higham Y1 - 2020/06/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/70/695/304.abstract N2 - It is widely reported that emergency presentations in general practice are increasing1,2 and recent audit data from practices we have worked with in Thames Valley support these observations: 74/76 (97%) GPs reported seeing at least one emergency presentation in the previous year and 61/67 (91%) experienced delays in ambulance attendance. Managing conditions such as a myocardial infarction, life-threatening asthma, or acute sepsis places a burden on primary care teams to initiate management for potentially seriously unwell patients. Despite the increasing frequency of these scenarios across the NHS as a whole, individual clinicians may go months or even years without having to manage one personally, and most staff do not receive regular training updates. In many cases there is no nationally agreed training programme. Although guidelines exist for many presentations, most have been written with hospital practice in mind, and their applicability to primary care can be limited.Recently, checklists (a form of cognitive aid) have been developed to support safe practice in hospitals, but checklists as mandated safety aids actually date back to the mid-1930s with the B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’. Early test flights were associated with serious accidents, and ‘pilot error’ was implicated, but these were experienced test pilots crewing the aircraft. It was difficult to believe that a lack of training was the problem, rather, ‘the number of procedures necessary … are far too many for even the most experienced pilot … ER -