Prehospital emergency care : official journal of the National Association of EMS Physicians and the National Association of State EMS Directors
-
While out-of-hospital under-triage of seriously injured older adults to tertiary trauma centers has long been acknowledged, no study has adjusted for place of injury or evaluated the extent of inter-facility under-triage. We sought to determine distance and confounder adjusted odds of treatment at a tertiary trauma center (TTC) for older adult trauma patients compared to younger trauma patients, for patients transported from the scene of injury and those transferred from a non-tertiary trauma (NTTC) center. ⋯ Injured older adults face significant under-triage to TTCs whether by EMS from the scene of injury or via transfer from NTTCs. Adjusting for proximity of injury to a TTC does not alter these findings.
-
Identifying stroke during a 9-1-1 call is critical to timely prehospital care. However, emergency medical dispatchers (EMDs) recognize stroke in less than half of 9-1-1 calls, potentially due to the words used by callers to communicate stroke signs and symptoms. We hypothesized that callers do not typically use words and phrases considered to be classical descriptors of stroke, such as focal neurologic deficits, but that a mixed-methods approach can identify words and phrases commonly used by 9-1-1 callers to describe acute stroke victims. ⋯ Most 9-1-1 callers used vague, non-specific, or distractor words and phrases and infrequently provide classic stroke descriptions during 9-1-1 calls for stroke. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies identified similar key words and phrases associated with accurate EMD stroke recognition. This study suggests that tools incorporating commonly used words and phrases could potentially improve EMD stroke recognition.
-
Rapid sequence intubation (RSI) is not only used in traumatic brain injuries in the out-of-hospital setting, but also for non-traumatic brain pathologies (NTBP) such as brain tumors, meningitis, encephalitis, hypoxic/anoxic brain injury, stroke, arteriovenous malformations, tumors, aneurysms, brain hemorrhage, as well as brain injury due to diabetes, seizures and toxicity, metabolic conditions, and alcohol and drug overdose. Previous research suggests that RSI is common in non-traumatic coma, but with an unknown prevalence of NTBP in those that receive RSI. If NTBP is common and if brain trauma RSI evidence is not valid for NTBP then a sizable proportion of NTBP receive this treatment without evidence of benefit. This study calculated the out-of-hospital NTBP prevalence in patients that had received RSI and explored factors that predicted survival. ⋯ Non-traumatic brain pathologies are seven times more prevalent than traumatic brain injuries in patients that underwent out-of-hospital RSI in Victoria, Australia. Since the mechanisms through which RSI impacts mortality might differ between traumatic brain injuries and NTBP, and given that NTBP is very prevalent, it follows that the use of RSI in NTBP could be unsupported.
-
Medical insurers have clearly defined which ambulance services will be reimbursed and which will not. Thus, ambulance agencies that provide emergency 9-1-1 services must be highly cognizant of their organization's revenue needs. This presents a distinction between publicly funded and privately funded organizations. This study seeks to identify any differences in the transport decision among agency ownership types. ⋯ Given the reimbursement practices of medical insurers, private ambulance services are incentivized towards patient transport. Operational revenue for these services is not generated through public budgeting processes but through user fees. Thus, private agencies are more reliant on billable services than are their publicly funded counterparts.