For six months a survey was made of all the patients in the Nottingham District Health Authority who died or who were brought to hospital after a cardiac arrest outside hospital. During this period just under half of the emergency ambulance shifts were covered by specially trained crews with defibrillators. During the study period the ICD coding of death certificates indicated that 894 (25%) of...

This paper tells the early history of penicillin patenting in Spain. Patents turn out to be useful instruments for analysing the management of knowledge and its circulation in different professional and geographical domains. They protected knowledge while contributing to standardisation. Patents also ensured quality and guaranteed reliability in manufacturing, delivering and prescribing new dru...

Recibido: 09/07/08. Revisado: 11/07/08. Aceptado: 23/07/08. Ninan T. Mathew. director de la Clínica de Cefalea de Houston. Profesor de Neurología en la Escuela de Medicina Universidad de Texas Houston. Presidente de la Sociedad Internacional de Cefalea, de la sección de cefalea de la Academia Americana de Neurología y del Consejo Americano para educación en cefalea. Es autor de 200 publicacione...

The Royal Army Medical Corps supplied one Field Ambulance unit (a Boer War innovation) in support of each Brigade. The role of the Field Ambulance was to evacuate and treat casualties but major injuries were only definitively treated in the Casualty Clearing Stations or Base Hospitals well behind the front. Each Field Ambulance had 10 officers and 240 men divided into 3 sections which in turn w...

The survival rate of medical emergencies depends highly on the intervention time and prompt medical care on the scene. The idea of “bring the doctor and medical equipment to the spot” was born in Hungary in the mid-1950s. The demand for advanced life support was a consequence of the fast growth of industry and traffic. It is worthwhile to review the development of the idea, the therapeutic meth...

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...

INTRODUCTION There is a compelling need to develop clinical performance indicators for ambulance services in order to move from indicators based primarily on response times and in light of the changing clinical demands on services. We report on progress on the national pilot of clinical performance indicators for English ambulance services. METHOD Clinical performance indicators were develope...

OBJECTIVE Flight nurses in the Norwegian National Air Ambulance Service are specialist nurse anesthetists or intensive care nursing specialists. For air ambulance bases far from hospitals, these nurses present otherwise unavailable competencies. This study reports a 6-year experience with flight nurse participation in local emergencies beyond the transportation phase. METHODS The fixed-wing a...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to evaluate whether a new e-learning tool for insight training of ambulance drivers can have an effect on drivers' driving behaviors, perceived driving competence, competence to assess risks, self-reflection, and safety attitudes. METHODS A quasi-experimental study design, with participants nonrandomly assigned into a control and intervention group, was used...