It is generally believed that Dominique Jean Larrey (17661842) was the rst to use the wordàmbulance' (Skandalakis et al., 2006). As a surgeon of Napoleon Bonaparte's Imperial Guard, he developed a plan for rapid evacuation of wounded soldiers from the battle eld during combat using exible medical units. The term ambulance was born. The rst types of these units were pulled by horses and were use...

Unlike the USA, South Africa (SA) does not have 'Good Samaritan' laws that oblige doctors to stop at road accidents. In SA, the conduct of doctors in such situations is governed by the common law. Doctors coming across injured people at a road accident should stop and render assistance, unless they are likely to be exposed to personal danger or injury, they are mentally or physically incapable ...

A retrospective cohort study of the 2002 Victorian prehospital emergency care documentation completed by ambulance paramedics had the objectives: (i) to design and implement a quality assessment tool to determine the quality of the ambulance patient care record (PCR)information; and (ii) to identify critical demographic and clinical items on the ambulance PCR that needed improvement. The study ...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization refers to stroke, the second most frequent cause of death in the world, in terms of pandemic. Present treatments are only effective within precise time windows. Only 10% of thrombolysis patients are eligible. Late assessment of the patient resulting from admission and lack of knowledge of the symptoms is the main explanation of lack of eligibility. MET...

BACKGROUND Despite the use of e-FAST in management of patients with abdominal trauma, its utility in prehospital setting is not widely adopted. The goal of this study is to develop a novel portable telesonography (TS) system and evaluate the comparability of the quality of images obtained via this system among healthy volunteers who undergo e-FAST abdominal examination in a moving ambulance and...

BACKGROUND The long-term mortality after prehospital treatment for acute poisoning has not been studied previously. Thus, we aimed to estimate the five-year mortality and examine the causes of death and predictors of death for all acutely poisoned patients treated in ambulances, the emergency outpatient clinic, and hospitals in Oslo during 2003-2004. METHODS A prospective cohort study include...