The evolving role of the Emergency Medical Retrieval Service critical care practitioner

From its Glasgow base, the Emergency Medical Retrieval Service (EMRS) provides secondary and primary critical care retrieval across Scotland. Over the past 24 months they have employed a team of five critical care practitioners (CCP), consisting of both paramedics and nurses. The multidisciplinary CCP team has been a great success, and as the team's experience grows, the role has progressed to advanced practitioner level, as per the Royal College of Nursing's (RCN) and College of Paramedics’ (COP) respective frameworks. This article will demonstrate this unique teams journey to advanced practice.

EMRS has two teams available 24 hours a day. Each team comprises of two, the first person being a consultant with a specialty in emergency medicine, anaesthetics or intensive care, and the second person being either a senior registrar from the same specialities or one of the CCP team.

‘Retrieval can be described as the deployment of a critical care team to a seriously ill or injured patients’ location to undertake resuscitation and stabilisation prior to safe transfer to definitive care (Hearns, 2012).’