BACKGROUND Patients with acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease often require prehospital emergency treatment. This enables patients who are less ill to be treated on-site and to avoid hospital admission, while severely ill patients can receive immediate ventilatory support in the form of intubation. The emergency physician faces difficult treatment decisions, however, and ...

BACKGROUND Advances in ultrasound imaging technology have made it more accessible to prehospital providers. Little is known about how ultrasound is being used in the prehospital environment and we suspect that it is not widely used in North America at this time. We believe that EMS system characteristics such as provider training, system size, population served, and type of transport will be as...

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...

INTRODUCTION Little is known about the risk perceptions and attitudes of healthcare personnel, especially of emergency prehospital medical care personnel, regarding the possibility of an outbreak or epidemic event. PROBLEM This study was designed to investigate pre-event knowledge and attitudes of a national sample of the emergency prehospital medical care providers in relation to a potential...

BACKGROUND Telemedicine is currently mainly applied as an in-hospital service, but this technology also holds potential to improve emergency care in the prehospital arena. We report on the safety, feasibility and reliability of in-ambulance teleconsultation using a telemedicine system of the third generation. METHODS A routine ambulance was equipped with a system for real-time bidirectional a...

Objective: Assessing patients’ satisfaction with emergency medical services (EMSs) is an important managerial point of view. The present study aimed to assess the patients’ satisfaction with EMS in Tabriz, Iran.Methods: This is a descriptive-analytic study that was done in the prehospital emergency and disaster management center of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. In this study, fro...

BACKGROUND Many low- and middle-income countries depend on emergency medical technicians (EMTs), nurses, midwives, and layperson community health workers with limited training to provide a majority of emergency medical, trauma, and obstetric care in the prehospital setting. To improve timely patient care and expand provider scope of practice, nations leverage cellular phones and call centers fo...

Therapeutic hypothermia has been shown to improve survival and neurological outcome after prehospital cardiac arrest. Existing experimental and clinical evidence supports the notion that delayed cooling results in lesser benefit compared to early induction of mild hypothermia soon after return of spontaneous circulation. Therefore a practical approach would be to initiate cooling already in the...

The role of doctors in prehospital care in the United Kingdom and the USA was compared using information obtained from a visit to the city of Houston emergency medical service (Houston, Texas) and from a review of published reports. The involvement of full time specialist emergency medical services physicians has been crucial to the development of improved standards of practice within American ...

background: fractures of femur are among the most important causes of mortality in musculoskeletal injuries. owning to lack of adequate research to compare various techniques of fracture stabilization, there has not yet been an agreement over a protocol to utilize a specific type of splint for femoral fracture immobilization. this study was thus conducted to compare the effects of simple and tr...