OBJECTIVE To determine whether ambulance crew triage trauma patients appropriately. DESIGN A retrospective descriptive study. SETTINGS Cornwall County Ambulance Service. VARIABLES STUDIED On-scene times, injury severity, establishment of intravenous infusion and time from scene to A&E department. SUBJECTS Patients with compound fracture of the lower limb taken to Truro Accident and Emer...

OBJECTIVE To assess the cost-effectiveness of an ambulance service within a comprehensive hospital/community-based program aimed at improving access and quality of reproductive health in poor-resources settings. METHODS Obstetrical cases referred to the hospital with the ambulance during a 3-month period were prospectively recorded. Clinical indications were used to determine the effectivenes...

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...

STUDY OBJECTIVES In the emergency medical services (EMS) system, appropriate prehospital care can substantially decrease casualty mortality and morbidity. This study designed a simulation model, evaluated the existing EMS system, and suggested improvements. METHODS The study focused on 23 networked EMS hospitals affiliated with 36 emergency response units (subgroups) to perform two-tier rescu...

The quality of emergency medical services (EMS) prior to a patient’s arrival at a hospital is directly affected by the efficiency to dispatch an ambulance for first aid. In this paper, we created an ambulance dispatching system for first aid, which is integrated with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and performed on a cloud platform. In virtue of ICT, the system can readily monito...

BACKGROUND To maximise the potential benefits of maternity care services, pregnant women need to be able to physically get to health facilities in a timely manner. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, transport represents a major practical barrier. Here we evaluate the extent to which an innovative national ambulance service in Ethiopia, together with mobile phones, may have been successful in averti...

Several Emergency Medical Service (EMS) agencies across the US have demonstrated that the time spent by EDs on ambulance diversion can be reduced by implementing community-wide policies that restrict the duration and frequency of diversion episodes. However, the mechanisms through which these reductions materialize are not well understood. EDs can respond to such restrictions by improving their...

OBJECTIVE To define and measure patient reported prehospital delay in presentation to the emergency department with chest pain and identify simple strategies that may reduce this delay. The authors investigated the null hypothesis that the patients choice of service to call for acute medical help has no effect on the timing of thrombolysis. METHOD A prospective observational study of prehospi...

BACKGROUND The modality of transport to the emergency department has implications for triage, evaluation, and treatment of patients with stroke. We performed this study to determine the national trends in modes of arrival in patients with stroke and its association with emergency department evaluation in a nationally representative sample of United States. METHODS We used the data from the Na...

We address the problem of ambulance dispatching, in which we must decide which ambulance to send to an incident in real time. In practice, it is commonly believed that the 'closest idle ambulance' rule is near-optimal and it is used throughout most literature. In this paper, we present alternatives to the classical closest idle ambulance rule. Most ambulance providers as well as researchers foc...