OBJECTIVE Since March 1992, intravenous nalbuphine hydrochloride has been used prehospital by paramedics in the Plymouth area. This study assesses the impact of this intervention. METHODS A prospective study of the parenteral analgesic requirements of 1000 consecutive patients arriving by ambulance at the accident and emergency (A&E) department of a large district general hospital. Where pare...

This paper presents a methodology for separating handwritten foreground pixels, from background pixels, in carbon copied medical forms. Comparisons between prior and proposed techniques are illustrated. This study involves the analysis of the New York State (NYS) Department of Health (DoH) Pre-Hospital Care Report (PCR) [Western Regional Emergency Medical Services, Bureau of Emergency Medical S...

background prehospital management of gunshot-wounded (gw) patients influences injury-induced morbidity and mortality. objectives to evaluate prehospital management to gw patients emphasizing the protocol of patient transfer to appropriate centers. patients and methods this prospective study, included all gw patients referred to four major, level-i hospitals in mashhad, iran. we evaluated demogr...

The Pediatric Assessment Triangle (PAT) has become the cornerstone for the Pediatric Education for Prehospital Professionals course, sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics. This concept for emergency assessment of children has been taught to more than 170,000 health care providers worldwide. It has been incorporated into most standardized American life support courses, including the Pe...

Acute stroke care in hospitals is best performed in organized stroke units, which are the essential part of the chain of recovery and form the backbone of prehospital, in-hospital, and posthospital care, that is, from home back to home. There is convincing evidence from a large number of randomized controlled trials that the outcomes of stroke and transient isch-emic attack (TIA) patients manag...

BACKGROUND Communication failure in prehospital emergency medicine can affect patient safety as it does in other areas of medicine as well. We analyzed the database of the critical incident reporting system for prehospital emergency medicine in Germany retrospectively regarding communication errors. METHODS Experts of prehospital emergency medicine and risk management screened the database fo...

Addressing inefficiencies in prehospital emergency care will contribute to increased availability of resources for emergency response, and the health and well-being of citizens. To address these problems, development and expansion of community paramedicine programs are taking place, involving the deployment of trained paramedics for providing care outside of their traditional emergency care pro...

BACKGROUND Identification of critically ill patients during prehospital care could facilitate early treatment and aid in the regionalization of critical care. Tools to consistently identify those in the field with or at higher risk of developing critical illness do not exist. We sought to validate a prehospital critical illness risk score that uses objective clinical variables in a contemporary...

BACKGROUND Emergency medical services (EMS) prenotification to hospitals regarding the arrival of patients who have had a stroke is recommended to facilitate the workup once the patient arrives. Most hospitals have the patient enter the emergency department (ED) before obtaining a head computed tomography (CT) scan. At Capital Health, prehospital stroke-alert patients are delivered directly to ...

Measuring quality in Emergency Medical Services (EMSs) systems is challenging. This paper reviews the current approaches to measuring quality in health care and EMS with a focus on currently used clinical performance indicators in EMS systems (US and international systems). The different types of performance indicators, the advantages and limitations of each type, and the evidence-based prehosp...