Prehospital emergency care : official journal of the National Association of EMS Physicians and the National Association of State EMS Directors
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Multicenter Study
Intubation Success in Critical Care Transport: A Multicenter Study.
Tracheal intubation (TI) is a lifesaving critical care skill. Failed TI attempts, however, can harm patients. Critical care transport (CCT) teams function as the first point of critical care contact for patients being transported to tertiary medical centers for specialized surgical, medical, and trauma care. The Ground and Air Medical qUality in Transport (GAMUT) Quality Improvement Collaborative uses a quality metric database to track CCT quality metric performance, including TI. We sought to describe TI among GAMUT participants with the hypothesis that CCT would perform better than other prehospital TI reports and similarly to hospital TI success. ⋯ CCT TI is not uncommon, and rates of TI and DASH-1A success are higher in adult patients and adult-focused CCT teams. TI success rates are higher in CCT than other prehospital settings, but lower than in-hospital success TI rates. Identifying factors influencing TI success among high performers should influence best practice strategies for TI.
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The Florida Adult Trauma Triage Criteria (FATTC) define specific parameters concerning injury mechanism and physiologic data that prompt paramedics to initiate a trauma alert and necessitate transport to a trauma center. In the state of Florida, paramedics are also given discretion to bring patients to the trauma center who do not meet those criteria. Our aim was to compare the injury characteristics and outcomes of adult patients who were evaluated in our trauma center after activation due to FATTC criteria vs. paramedic discretion (PD) and to identify predictors of PD. ⋯ While PD patients were less seriously injured and had lower mortality, they experienced similar lengths of stay and resource utilization after presentation. Paramedics may be able to identify patients at risk for poor outcomes who would otherwise not be captured by FATTC.
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Observational Study
Prehospital Interventions Performed on Pediatric Trauma Patients in Iraq and Afghanistan.
United States (US) and coalition military medical units deployed to combat zones frequently encounter pediatric trauma patients. Pediatric patients may present unique challenges due to their anatomical and physiological characteristics and most military prehospital providers lack pediatric-specific training. A minimal amount of data exists to illuminate the prehospital care of pediatric patients in this environment. We describe the prehospital care of pediatric trauma patients in Iraq and Afghanistan. ⋯ Pediatric subjects comprised over 1 in 13 casualties treated in the joint theaters with the majority injured by explosives. Vascular access and hypothermia prevention interventions were the most frequently performed procedures.
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Observational Study
A Continuous Quality Improvement Airway Program Results in Sustained Increases in Intubation Success.
Airway management is a critical skill for air medical providers, including the use of rapid sequence intubation (RSI) medications. Mediocre success rates and a high incidence of complications has challenged air medical providers to improve training and performance improvement efforts to improve clinical performance. ⋯ An integrated advanced airway management program was successful in improving RSI intubation performance in a large air medical company.
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Delayed sequence intubation (DSI) involves the administration of ketamine to facilitate adequate preoxygenation in the agitated patient. DSI was introduced into the Clinical Practice Guideline for Intensive Care Flight Paramedics in Victoria in late 2013. We aimed to describe the clinical characteristics of patients receiving DSI. ⋯ DSI provides a reasonably safe and effective approach for intensive care flight paramedics in the preoxygenation of agitated, hypoxic patients in order to decrease the risk of peri-intubation desaturation and related hypoxic injury.