Is bupivacaine in the emergency department underused : scope for improved patient care?
Bupivacaine seems to be underused in some appropriate circumstances. Accordingly, there is scope for improvement in patient care through critical evaluation of local anaesthetic practice. This is particularly necessary because barriers to bupivacaine use are often non-clinical (habit, availability, familiarity) rather than clinical (toxicity, onset time).
Our findings encourage the introduction of immunohistochemistry as a rapid screening tool for the assessment of BRAF status in melanoma patients in routine diagnostic procedures and prepare the ground for other studies to highlight the role of immunohistochemical BRAF V600E expression in patients at the time of progression.