Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
-
To assess the ability of rural Australian nurse teams to manage deteriorating patients. ⋯ Despite a satisfactory knowledge base, the application of knowledge was low with notable performance deficits in these demanding and stressful situations. The identification and management of patient deterioration needs to be taught in professional development programmes incorporating high fidelity simulation techniques. The Team Emergency assessment tool proved to be a valid measure of team performance in patient deterioration scenarios.
-
Healthcare organisations have started to examine the impact that the human worker has on patient safety. Adopting the Crew Resource Management (CRM) approach, used in aviation, the CRM or non-technical skills of anaesthetists, surgeons, scrub practitioners and emergency physicians have recently been identified to assist in their training and assessment. Paramedics are exposed to dynamic and dangerous situations where patients have to be managed, often with life-threatening injuries or illness. ⋯ The aim of this paper was to review the literature on the non-technical (social and cognitive) skills used by paramedics. This review was undertaken as part of a task analysis to identify the non-technical skills used by paramedics. Of the seven papers reviewed, the results have shown very little research on this topic and so reveal a gap in the understanding of paramedic non-technical skills.
-
A short-cut review was carried out to establish whether pelvic immobilisation with a pelvic compression device or with a wrapped sheet would provide haemorrhage control. Four studies were relevant to the question. The author, date and country of publication, patient group studied, study type, relevant outcomes, results and study weaknesses of these papers are shown in table 3. The clinical bottom line is that both may provide some haemorrhage control, but there is insufficient evidence to recommend one over the other