BACKGROUND Emergency medical services (EMS) systems provide professional prehospital emergency medical care and transportation to help improve outcomes from emergency conditions. Ghana's national ambulance service has relatively low public utilization in comparison with the large burden of acute disease. METHODS A survey instrument was developed using Pechansky and Thomas's model of access co...

BACKGROUND Approximately 16,000 children are transported by ambulances each day, and there are an estimated 4,500 ambulance crashes each year. Information about emergency medical services (EMS) provider knowledge, opinions, and behaviors regarding occupant restraint is lacking. OBJECTIVES To measure the knowledge, opinions, and behaviors of EMS personnel regarding child and provider restraint...

Providers of emergency medical services (EMS) must communicate vital information during critical phases of operations. Errors in communications, for example, the failure to hear a directive, will compromise safe and effective patient care. This article presents a case that resulted in litigation because of communication failures during the interfacility transfer of a trauma patient who subseque...

OBJECTIVES To identify those attributes experts regard as desirable qualities in the ambulance technician, paramedic, and clinical supervisor. METHODS The Delphi technique was used to gain a consensus view from a panel of experts. The first round of the study asked the experts to list the attributes they believed were desirable for the ambulance technician, the ambulance paramedic, and the cl...

INTRODUCTION An effective Emergency Medical Service system does not exist in Nepal. For an effective EMS system to be developed the scale of the problem and the existing facilities need to be studied. METHODS Prospective observational study was carried out on 1964 patients attending Emergency Department at Patan Hospital during one month period of September 2006. The patients were specificall...

BACKGROUND Predicting case types that are unlikely to be treated by paramedics can aid in managing demand for emergency ambulances by identifying cases suitable for alternative management pathways. The aim of this study was to identify the patient characteristics and triage outcomes associated with 'no paramedic treatment' for cases referred for emergency ambulance dispatch following secondary ...

Objectives: To examine the consistency of triage outcomes by nurses using four types of computerised decision support software in NHS Direct. Methods: 119 scenarios were constructed based on calls to ambulance services that had been assigned the lowest priority category by the emergency medical dispatch systems in use. These scenarios were presented to nurses working in four NHS Direct call cen...

INTRODUCTION Emergency telephone calls placed by bystanders are crucial to the recognition of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), fast ambulance dispatch and initiation of early basic life support. Clear and efficient communication between caller and call-taker is essential to this time-critical emergency, yet few studies have investigated the impact that linguistic factors may have on the n...

BACKGROUND Following the introduction of Helicopter Emergency Ambulance Services (HEAS) in the United Kingdom in the last ten years this paper examines the costs and benefits of three contrasting services in Cornwall, London and Sussex. METHODS Pre-hospital processes of care were compared between helicopter attended patients and land ambulance patients in all three studies, and health outcome...

BACKGROUND Hospital-based clinicians have been shown to use and attain benefits from online evidence systems. To our knowledge there have been no studies investigating whether and how ambulance officers use online evidence systems if provided. We surveyed ambulance officers to examine their knowledge and use of the Clinical Information Access Program (CIAP), an online evidence system providing ...