Community paramedicine: a global phenomenon?

This systematic review was undertaken by a team of researchers based in Canada who were interested in exploring the expanding scope of practice for paramedics working in the areas of unscheduled, urgent, low-acuity illness and injury. They termed this work as ‘community paramedicine’.

Here in the United Kingdom (UK) we might parallel this term with work undertaken by some paramedic practitioners (PP) and/or emergency care practitioners (ECP). However, we need to be cautious when using these terms as, even here in the UK, there is no consensus in our understanding of these roles and, it is likely that there is still a way to go before we will be able to confidently talk about these roles as being standardised in relation to scope of practice.

Using the Cochrane methodology, a systematic review was undertaken to examine the evidence for and/or against the development of ‘community paramedicine’. The research team searched Medline, Embase and CINAHL between the dates of 1 January 2000 until 30 September 2011, using a variety of search terms related to community health, paramedics and emergency medical services. In addition, other articles were identified through a manual search of bibliographies and by contacting a variety of experts in the field.