Progressing patient safety in the Emergency Medical Services

Introduction Patients are vulnerable during emergency episodes outside the formal care sector, for example, care provided by paramedics responding to a stroke or heart attack at home. Yet much less is known about the safety of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) as compared with primary or secondary healthcare.1 This relative lack of information is important given there are aspects of EMS care that create unique patient safety challenges. EMS staff are not surrounded by the usual safety infrastructure one finds in hospitals or community facilities. The episodic nature of each interaction means EMS staff lack the information one finds in more predictable care contexts. Even in highly developed EMS systems, patient history will be unavailable. This results in an almost complete reliance on the patient, family/carer or bystander to describe pertinent clinical history such as ‘do not resuscitate’ plans for the patient, or how the current emergency...
Source: BMJ Quality and Safety - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Editorials Source Type: research