Objective: Emergency workers, including ambulance personnel, must cope with a variety of duty related stressors including traumatic incident exposures. Little is known about the variables that might be associated with post-traumatic stress symptom in high risk occupational groups such as ambulance personnel. This study investigated the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among Swedish ...

Objectives—The aim of this study was to examine the quality of handover of patients in the resuscitation room by describing the current perceptions of medical and ambulance staV. Methods—This was a descriptive survey using two anonymous questionnaires to gauge current opinion, one designed for medical staV and the other for ambulance staV. Questionnaires were distributed to medical staV in two ...

BACKGROUND From January 30-February 6, 2011, New South Wales was affected by an exceptional heat wave, which broke numerous records. Near real-time Emergency Department (ED) and ambulance surveillance allowed rapid detection of an increase in the number of heat-related ED visits and ambulance calls during this period. The purpose of this study was to quantify the excess heat-related and all-cau...

BACKGROUND Medical emergency motorcycles (MEM) can be used in time-critical conditions like cardiac arrest and multi-traumatized patients in an attempt to reduce the response time. Other potential benefits with MEM are more efficient patient evaluation, reduction of unnecessary EMS car ambulance missions and reduced cost. The potential benefits have been evaluated in this study. The incidence o...

OBJECTIVE To describe the demographic and clinical characteristics of patients who are not transported to hospital after an emergency (999) call to the East Midlands Ambulance Service, the reason for non-transportation, and the priority assigned when the ambulance is dispatched. METHODS The first 500 consecutive non-transported patients from 1 March 2000 were identified from the ambulance ser...

OBJECTIVES This paper aims to examine whether an adaptation of the International Classification of Disease (ICD) coding system can be applied retrospectively to final paramedic assessment data in an ambulance dataset with a view to developing more fine-grained, clinically relevant case definitions than are available through point-of-call data. METHODS Over 1.2 million case records were extrac...

Aiming at improving the efficiency and reliability of ambulance service, several location models for ambulance stations have been proposed in the operations research literature. Well-known approaches to this problem are coverage model and median model. Coverage model looks for the location to maximize the (deterministic or probabilistic) covered demand of ambulance calls. Hence this model can b...

OBJECTIVES To determine the association between ambulance response time and survival from out of hospital cardiopulmonary arrest and to estimate the effect of reducing response times. DESIGN Cohort study. SETTING Scottish Ambulance Service. SUBJECTS All out of hospital cardiopulmonary arrests due to cardiac disease attended by the Scottish Ambulance Service during May 1991 to March 1998. ...

BACKGROUND In 1999, a new major trauma system was proposed for the state of Victoria, Australia. The guidelines for the new system were aimed at delivering major trauma cases to definitive trauma care in the least time possible. The aim of the present study was to analyse the potential effect of this system on Victoria's ambulance services. METHODS The present study modelled the workload of m...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Few acute stroke patients are treated with alteplase, partly because of significant prehospital delays after symptom onset. The aim of this study was to determine among ambulance-transported stroke patients factors associated with stroke recognition and factors associated with a call for ambulance assistance within 1 hour from symptom onset. METHODS For 6 months in 2004...