References
Pre-hospital technology research: reflecting on a collaborative project between ambulance service and academia
Abstract
The University of Aberdeen MIME project (Managing Information in Medical Emergencies) aimed to develop technology to support volunteer rural community first responders when managing patients. This can be a particularly stressful activity with many challenges to overcome while waiting for ambulance clinicians to arrive. The MIME system employed lightweight medical sensors streaming data (heart and respiratory rate, and blood oxygen saturation) wirelessly to a tablet computer. Novel software was developed to present these data on-screen in a simple way and facilitate the quick digital capture of first responder actions and observations. MIME also applied the technique of Natural Language Generation, which interrogated sensor data, user-inputted actions and observations to automatically generate a handover report in English. This paper describes the MIME system, and then focuses on our collaboration journey between academia and the Scottish Ambulance Service. We illustrate the challenges encountered during our research and development, and describe the academia-ambulance service collaboration model that was developed to deliver success. We also discuss the Knowledge Exchange sub-context to our research activities, which coincided with the early development of research capacity within the ambulance service.
Pre-hospital care describes the care delivered to a patient out of hospital in a nominal emergency situation. This is the type of care that is normally associated with ambulances and ambulance clinicians. Some ambulance services have developed innovative volunteer models to care for pre-hospital patients while an ambulance is en-route. The premise is that even those with basic first-aid skills can save a life, in specific contexts. For example, in the United States there was a call from Government following the 9/11 terrorist attacks to enhance citizen readiness for, and resilience after, emergencies, resulting in the formation of community emergency response teams (Connolly, 2012). This model has been advocated for developing countries that have increasing numbers of patients but have insufficient resources to set up large emergency care systems (Sun and Wallis, 2012). Such first responder systems are particularly applicable and valuable to remote and rural areas where there are fewer ambulance assets (i.e. clinicians and vehicles) and the distances travelled can be much greater (Rahman et al, 2014)—this can increase ambulance response times, especially when coupled with poor road networks or other geographical challenges.
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