Common benign causes of abdominal pain include bloating, constipation and round ligament syndrome (Hopcroft and Forte, 2003)..
A 21-year-old woman called 999 for an emergency ambulance complaining of dizziness, nausea, vomiting and mild abdominal discomfort. An advanced paramedic was dispatched to assess the patient with the...
To produce the evidence required for discussion of the research question, a literature search was carried out. CINAHL Complete and MEDLINE Complete were searched, using the terms in Table 1. The...
When the heart contracts and blood is ejected from the left ventricle, a pressure wave is generated and transmitted into the aorta and arterial tree. The flexible and elastic nature of artery walls...
Electrocardiograms (ECGs) have become an integrated part of an ambulance clinician's toolkit, with thousands being performed each year (Brady et al, 2012). Invented in 1903 by Willem Einthoven, a...
Systolic pressure is the force of BP on arterial walls at the end of ventricular contraction, i.e. in systole (Tortora and Derrickson, 2017). Diastolic pressure is the force exerted by the remaining...
The content of the air we breathe is a mixture of gases, with each gas exerting a pressure dependent on its proportional size. This is called its partial pressure and is abbreviated as the letter ‘P’,...
Arterial oxygen saturation or the discovered oxygen level in arterial blood (SaO2) is invasive, and it is difficult to monitor trends in a practice setting. In 1972, the idea of a non-invasive pulse...
St John Ambulance (SJA) is the sole provider of ambulance services to the paediatric retrieval team at CATS and the crews providing the service are based on site at the Great Ormond Street Hospital....
Sepsis is a life-threatening condition with estimates of up to 37 000 deaths annually in the UK alone. When sepsis is not treated the mortality rate increases by 8% every hour (Cronshaw et al, 2011)....
Current UK ambulance guidelines (Joint Royal Colleges Ambulance Liaison Committee (JRCALC), 2013) advocate the use of nitrates (in particular, glyceryl trinitrate) as the first-line treatment of ACPE....
The heartbeat is initiated by an intrinsic electrical system composed of modified myocytes. These myocytes are organised into a group of spontaneously discharging pacemaker cells, situated in the...