Clinical Practice

Not enough is done to ensure the safety of paramedics

‘You can never eliminate the risk of assault on staff. The risk of injury can, however, be minimised significantly by the provision of body armour for front-line ambulance personnel. Good radio...

Automated external defibrillation: implications for paramedic practice

‘The majority of sudden cardiac deaths are of ischaemic aetiology secondary to atherosclerotic coronary artery disease and affect the older section (35 years) of the population. In a significant...

Violence in the workplace: implementing the Instant Aggression Model

‘There were 87.5% of paramedics exposed to workplace violence. Verbal abuse was the most prevalent form of workplace violence (82%), with intimidation (55%), physical abuse (38%), sexual harassment...

Impact of increasing obesity on primary health carers: an Australian perspective

The manual handling risks to paramedics and fire service first responders in Australia are significant but are not quantifiable; anecdotally there are injuries associated with incidents involving...

Understanding the difference between overweight, obese and bariatric

Various methods can be used to determine excess adipose tissue, in particular, Body Mass Index (BMI), waist measurement and waist-to-hip ratio..

Rhabdomyolysis: an overview for pre-hospital clinicians

Rhabdomyolysis is a syndrome that is characterised by the destruction of striated (skeletal) muscle leading to the release of cellular contents into the circulating blood plasma (Vanholder et al,...

Single-dose activated charcoal as a pre-hospital treatment for self-poisoning

A search strategy was undertaken of medical and nursing databases including Medline, Cinahl, Embase, Psychinfo, the Cochrane database of systematic reviews, together with the British Medical Journal...