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Ambulance Dispatching and Use of Prehospital Emergency Care : A Prospective Study of the Ambulance Service in Sweden
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Maconochie, Ian K. Smart, Cordet |
| Abstract | s7 experiences of their own and of others. These outcomes suggest that the ways that patients decide whether an event is a health emergency differs from traditional medical decision making , and provide some answers as to why patients access emergency health services "inappropriately". Objective: To assess the medical needs of patients transported by ambulance in urban and rural areas within the same county and with the same theoretical criteria for triage. Methods: A prospective consecutive study was carried out during a six-week period. The ambulance staff completed a questionnaire on which they assessed each patient's need for prehospital care, based on on-scene assessment and the need for prehospital interventions. In addition to the questionnaire, data were extracted from the ambulance medical records database for each case. Results: A total of 1,977 ambulance missions were enrolled in the study. The results indicate that there is a substantial safety margin in the priority assessments made by the call center, and that the ambulance staffs support the call center's safety margin for initial priorities despite lack of on-scene confirmation. There are difficulties for the emergency medical services (EMS) organization in meeting patients' essential needs. For example, on-scene assessments indicate that one-third of the patients for whom the dispatch center orders an ambulance do not need the ambulance service, and the advanced life support unit is not systematically involved in the most serious cases. Conclusions: Demands for ambulance response are not the same as needs for prehospital care. There are inappropriate uses of the EMS, and in a minority of cases, the dispatch center could possibly direct the patients to alternative transports. Evaluation on scene must be considered in the prehospital needs assessment. Introduction: Response time is a very important factor in determining the quality of prehospital emergency medical services (EMS). |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2516FDE634AB3F6E7C21B61E21C22A14/S1049023X00011973a.pdf/how_and_what_do_you_declare_a_major_incident.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
