Learning Objectives: The objective was to create an assessment tool for emergent cricothyrotomy using best practice checklist development and expert consensus.

Introduction/Background: Emergent cricothyrotomy is an infrequently performed, potentially life-saving procedural skill that is essential for emergency physicians to master during residency training. However, opportunities for real-life exposure to perform this procedure during residency is rare and ensuring emergency medicine graduates can perform this procedure correctly is essential. For rare, invasive procedures such as cricothyrotomy, checklist simulation assessments allowing for objective measures are best practice for competency based medical education. However, the literature for performing emergency cricothyrotomy is descriptive, not inclusive of evaluative checklists, and lacking a checklist that allows for multiple cricothyrotomy techniques.

Educational Objectives: The objective was to create an assessment tool for emergent cricothyrotomy using best practice checklist development and expert consensus.

Curricular Design: After an initial checklist was created based on literature review, a modified Delphi approach was used to design a final checklist. A multidisciplinary panel of 13 experts, including emergency medicine physicians and trauma surgeons, reviewed the initial checklist. Feedback was reviewed and subsequent iterations of the checklist were reviewed by the same panel of experts until final consensus of a 27 item dichotomous checklist was achieved.

Impact/Effectiveness: After 3 rounds of revisions, a rigorously developed procedural checklist for emergent cricothyrotomy was created (Figure A). To reach consensus, the checklist included options for several acceptable techniques to correctly perform the procedure. This adds to previously published work by developing a rigorously designed, versatile dichotomous procedure checklist that accounts for various techniques. This checklist can serve as a foundation for the development of a curriculum to ensure graduating residents can correctly perform this critical task prior to graduation.

Introduction: The objective of this study was to analyze the messages of influential emergency medicine (EM) Twitter users in the United States (US) during the early stages of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic by characterizing the themes, emotional tones, temporal viewpoints, and depth of engagement with the tweets.

Methods: We performed a retrospective mixed-methods analysis of publicly available Twitter data derived from the publicly available “Coronavirus Tweet IDs” dataset, March 3, 2020–May 1, 2020. Original tweets and modified retweets in the dataset by 50 influential EM Twitter users in the US were analyzed using linguistic software to report the emotional tone and temporal viewpoint. We qualitatively analyzed a 25% random subsample and report themes.

Results: There were 1315 tweets available in the dataset from 36/50 influential EM Twitter users in the US. The majority of tweets were either positive (455/1315, 34.6%) or neutral (407/1315, 31%) in tone and focused on the present (1009/1315, 76.7%). Qualitative analysis identified six distinct themes, with users most often sharing news or clinical information.

Conclusions: During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, influential EM Twitter users in the US delivered mainly positive or neutral messages, most often pertaining to news stories or information directly relating to patient care. The majority of these messages led to engagement by other users. This study underscores how EM influencers can leverage social media in public health outbreaks to bring attention to topics of importance.