Legal

Community paramedics: need of legal education specific to the pre-hospital non-emergency environment (discussion based on Texas)

Community paramedicine institutes medical monitoring, treatment, and interventions performed by a paramedic into the home setting (White and Wingrove, 2012). However, community paramedicine also...

Principlism: when values conflict

The four principles approach to biomedical ethics provides a straightforward framework for considering moral dilemmas, and is based on four moral principles: respect for autonomy, beneficence,...

Crisis resource management in relation to empowering people to speak up in emergency medical service clinical practice settings

The population of Qatar is in excess of 2.42 million (76.2% male versus 23.8% female) (MDPS, 2016). Almost 90% of the country's population comprises expatriate workers. The country's most populous...

Informed consent in paramedic practice

The discussion that follows is concerned only with consent as it relates to a competent adult patient receiving treatment in England. Patients who lack capacity, are under 18 years of age, or...

The ethical and legal dilemmas paramedics face when managing a mental health patient

The patient, who will be called John for confidentiality purposes, presented to the ambulance service with an ‘altered mental state’. John had arrived at a friend's house during the night, behaving in...

Autoethnographic analysis of the self through an occupational story of a paramedic

I had a feeling that the job would be a challenging one given it involved a child. I glanced at the two-way radio and silently hoped; cancel us and we can go back to the mess room and work our way...

Fit to practise: does more need to be done to improve the health and wellbeing of paramedics?

The physically strenuous nature of a paramedic's job calls for high levels of physical fitness in order to maintain their ability to work, and to stay healthy. Sterud et al (2006) conducted a...

Hyperacute stroke unit training for paramedics

A dedicated stroke training course for paramedics was developed by a multidisciplinary working party, comprising healthcare professionals (from stroke clinician backgrounds) and educationalists, to...

Involving adults who lack capacity in research: ethical and legal challenges for the pre-hospital and emergency medicine context

The Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA) took force in 2007; the long-awaited legislation that addressed the legal lacuna regarding decisions made on behalf of adults deemed unable to consent for...

Integrating the 6Cs of nursing into paramedic practice

After taking it to the wider team, we could see where it linked to each area of practice we were teaching and set about embedding it into all of our practice placements and linking it to our teaching...

Regulatory impediments to the implementation of a community paramedicine programme in Virginia

What is CP? Put simply, it could be considered an expansion or realignment in the focus of EMS. An effective graphic representation of this change was included in the 2013 CP briefing for the EMS on...