Optimizing trauma care delivery is paramount to saving lives on the battlefield. During the past decade of conflict, trauma care performance improvement at combat support hospitals and forward surgical teams in Afghanistan and Iraq has increased through Joint Trauma System and DoD Trauma Registry data collection, analysis, and rapid evidence-based adjustments to clinical practice guidelines. Al...

BACKGROUND The utility of advanced prehospital interventions for severe blunt traumatic brain injury (BTI) remains controversial. Of all trauma patient subgroups it has been anticipated that this patient group would most benefit from advanced prehospital interventions as hypoxia and hypotension have been demonstrated to be associated with poor outcomes and these factors may be amenable to preho...

Injury remains a major cause of death and disability worldwide, and places an enormous burden on countries with limited resources. The optimal way to reduce life-threatening injuries is through primary prevention efforts that decrease the incidence and severity of injuries. When prevention fails, however, it is often possible to minimize the consequences of injury through effective prehospital ...

The performance of nurses in prehospital care (PHC) assumes acquiring specific competences. The objectives of the present study were to verify nurses' opinion on theoretical knowledge and nursing skills necessary for the practice in pre-hospital setting and to analyze them according to their clinical practice. In this descriptive study, the opinion of nurses, from public pre-hospital care servi...

Few data warehousing systems provide a complete and continuous history of trauma patients from the outset of prehospital care to the point of hospital discharge. Typical prehospital database systems are limited to data recorded by emergency personnel during patient transport and contain a minimal number of data points. This incomplete information provides a snapshot of patient status during the...

UNLABELLED Up to 3 million US children are cared for by emergency medical services (EMSs) annually. Limited research exists on pediatric prehospital care. The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) mission is to perform high-quality research for children, including prehospital research. Our objective was to develop a pediatric-specific prehospital research agenda. METHODS ...

INTRODUCTION Road traffic injuries (RTIs) and attendant fatalities on Nigerian roads have been on an increasing trend over the past three decades. Mortality from RTIs in Nigeria is estimated to be 162 deaths/100,000 population. This study aims to compare and identify best prehospital trauma care practices in Nigeria and some other African countries where prehospital services operate. METHODS ...

Emergency medical services (EMS) systems, and prehospital care are difficult to evaluate. Accordingly, the true efficacy and value of such systems are difficult to determine. The multitude of variations and combinations of involved factors makes standardisation and comparison difficult, and universal indicators are hard to develop. Various attempts have been made to determine valid indicators o...

OBJECTIVES To develop a feasible and safe prehospital decision support system (DSS) for the emergency medical services (EMS), facilitating safe steering of geriatric patients to an optimal level of healthcare. METHODS The development process involves four consecutive steps. The first step was gathering data from patients transported by EMS, with the electronic patient care record, to retrospe...