Emergency medical services

UK prehospital practitioners' knowledge of heat-related illness and heatstroke

The study aimed to assess the baseline knowledge of practitioners working in prehospital medical services in the UK. Specifically, it intended to assess knowledge around the risks, recognition and...

Prehospital management of sepsis with IV antibiotics: a UK literature review

The primary aim of this work was to review the UK-based literature to understand: whether the administration of IV antibiotics by the ambulance service to septic patients is associated with improved...

Disaster preparedness of health professionals at mass gatherings: a scoping review

Scoping reviews, as their name implies, are used to determine how much progress has been made in a particular area of research. In order to explore the question ‘What is known about the preparedness...

Hyperventilation in cardiac arrest—a systematic review and narrative synthesis

This review followed a focused literature search of three databases—CINAHL, MEDLINE and ScienceDirect—from 1 January 2000 to 27 April 2022. Only human, adult, prehospital studies were included. Papers...

Novel moving, handling and extraction simulation for students in a soft play area

Of the 50 students who were invited to the simulation activity, 45 attended and 43 gave written consent and took part in the study (96%). Participants were in a broad range of age (18–47 years) and...

Prehospital end-tidal carbon dioxide measurement

The most common method of measuring EtCO2 in clinical practice is the infrared analyser. Rays from a source of infrared light are passed through a sample of gas as a detector analyses the degree of...

Paramedic practice in low light conditions: a scoping review

Suggestions from the professional panel to improve driving were limited. The use of a dark mode to reduce the glare from the mobile data terminal was suggested as was using the low-power mode for blue...

Use of specialist paramedic dispatch in emergency ambulance control

The aim of this study was to highlight the key differences between the triage and dispatch processes of specialist resources, to establish if the findings support the use of one model over another to...

Chest compression efficacy of child resuscitators

In a cardiac arrest, a 911 dispatcher can often coach a bystander to perform chest compressions if CPR has not been initiated. In the case that a lightweight resuscitator such as a child has made the...

Applying organisational behaviour theory to aid emergency staff retention

Stemming from the works of Barnard (1938) and Follett (1941), organisational behaviour theory is characterised by its approach to the analysis of an organisation and its people on a macro scale. The...

Racial disparities in emergency care for seizures in the United States

This study uses EMS data from the 2017–2019 NEMSIS V3.5.0 database to perform a retrospective cross-sectional analysis. NEMSIS is a national database funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety...

How accurate is the prehospital diagnosis of hyperventilation syndrome?

The study included a consecutive series of patients and was similar to a cohort study, which corresponds to a single-gate diagnostic accuracy study design (Rutjes et al, 2005). A retrospective...

Alcohol/substance use and occupational/post-traumatic stress in paramedics

The purpose of this study was to undertake a systematic review of literature relevant to the paramedic profession, exploring the relationship between alcohol and substance use with occupational and...

Prehospital use of the traction splint for suspected mid-shaft femur fractures

The introduction of the simulation-based training for all operational paramedics had a positive impact on the management of femur fractures. Post intervention, a total of 69 femur fractures were...

Point-of-care ultrasound use in the pre-hospital setting

Since its introduction, POCUS has been used to enhance the assessment of a wide range of clinical conditions across medical and traumatic pathologies. For example, the ‘focused assessment with...

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