Prehospital emergency care : official journal of the National Association of EMS Physicians and the National Association of State EMS Directors
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We sought to develop a reliable and valid tool for measuring teamwork among emergency medical technician (EMT) partnerships. ⋯ We developed a reliable and valid survey to evaluate teamwork between EMT partners.
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Air medical transport provides rapid transport to definitive care. Overtriage and the expense and risk of transport may offset survival benefits. ⋯ Very few prehospital criteria were associated with clinically important outcomes in helicopter-transported patients. Evidence-based guidelines for the most appropriate utilization of air medical transport need to be further evaluated and developed for injured patients.
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Occupational injuries are an important source of morbidity for emergency medical services (EMS) providers. Previous work has shown that employee perceptions of an organization's commitment to safety (i.e., safety climate) correlate with adherence to safe practices. ⋯ EMS workers perceiving a high degree of perceived safety climate was associated with twofold greater odds of self-reported level of strict adherence to safe work practices. Frequent safety-related feedback/training was the one dimension of safety climate that had the strongest association with adherence to safe workplace behaviors.
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Recent research efforts in emergency medical services (EMS) has identified variability in the ability of EMS personnel to recognize their level of stress-related impairment. Developing a better understanding of how workplace stress may affect EMS personnel is a key step in the process of increasing awareness of the impact of work-related stress and stress-related impairment. ⋯ These findings indicate that exposure to both chronic and critical incident stressors increases the risk of EMS providers' developing a posttraumatic stress reaction. Higher levels of chronic stress, critical incident stress, and alcohol use significantly related to an increased level of PTSS. Further, for those reporting high levels of alcohol use or critical incident stress, interactions with high levels of chronic operational stress were associated with higher rates of PTSS. For those interested in the impact of work-related stress in EMS, these findings indicate that attention must be paid to levels of stress associated with both critical incident exposure as well as the chronic stress providers experience on a day-to-day basis.
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Prior studies have highlighted wide variation in emergency medical services (EMS) workplace safety culture across agencies. ⋯ Individual EMS worker perceptions of workplace safety culture are associated with composite measures of patient and provider safety outcomes. This study is preliminary evidence of the association between safety culture and patient or provider safety outcomes.