Accident and Emergency Medicine

This little book has been written primarily for the senior house officer in Accident and Emergency and the registrar pursuing a career in the specialty. I hope also that it will be of interest to medical students. Thanks to the initiative of Professor Miles Irving, Professor of Surgery, University of Manchester, medical students have been taught Accident and Emergency in Hope Hospital since 1974. Many of the answers to the questions here have been elaborated as a result of their enquiring minds. It has been a pleasure to teach them. MCQs should be informative and entertaining and not regarded as a tiresome chore merely because of self­ assessment scoring. I have omitted the boxes and the "don't know" response. The answers are either true or false. I have attempted to slot the questions into various sections with some degree of sequence, but there is an inevitable overlap particularly with regard to the sections on the unresponsive patient, poisoning and injury. The final section is a selected mixture of Accident and Emergency and I thought "Pot­ pourri" an appropriate title. I have enjoyed compiling the questions and I hope that both undergraduates and postgraduates will find reading them a painless and worthwhile exercise. Finally my thanks are due to my secretary Eileen Bates for her typing and patience.