Prehospital emergency care : official journal of the National Association of EMS Physicians and the National Association of State EMS Directors
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Out-of-hospital emergency medical services (EMS) need relevant and measurable indicators of quality. Those front-line workers who provide service directly to the customer are integral to the process of defining quality. The authors' objective was to obtain from paramedics, the front-line workers in the EMS system, their perspective on quality of care. ⋯ From the perspective of the study participants, indicators of the quality of out-of-hospital care differ from many used in traditional EMS quality assurance programs. Future studies should investigate the applicability of these indicators to the total quality management of EMS systems.
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To compare the initial emergency medical services (EMS) prehospital assessment of medical and traumatic cardiopulmonary arrest in the pediatric patient with that of the Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) and assess differences and implications for EMS training and prevention. ⋯ The authors found good agreement between EMS prehospital assessments and autopsy diagnoses for identifying pediatric SIDS, but child abuse was not well identified prior to autopsy.
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The objective of this study was to identify clinical findings that are associated with spinal fracture and/or spinal cord injuries in prehospital trauma patients. ⋯ Prehospital clinical findings of altered mental status, neurologic deficit, evidence of intoxication, spinal pain, and suspected extremity fracture were documented for all patients with significant spinal injuries in this series. These findings may be useful to identify patients who require prehospital spinal immobilization.