Procedural sedation and analgesia in the emergency department: what are the risks?

The practitioner of emergency medicine is routinely faced with patients in need of emergent procedures and pain control and sedation. Our challenge is to make our patients' experiences as painless and as safe as possible, while maximizing our ability to perform the procedure at hand; this is not always an easy task given the propensity of each human body to react differently to interventions and stimuli. We can best meet this challenge by understanding how our patients and pharmaceutical agents intermingle in the risk-benefit equation we formulate before starting our "experiment." Coupling this information with fundamentally sound patient care and monitoring will minimize bad experiences with PSA for both the patient and practitioner.