ABSTRACT
Objective@#Assault in the emergency room can lead to a decrease in the quality of the entire emergency medical system due to the functional deterioration and increased fatigue of the medical staff. This research tried to identify and analyze the characteristics of assault against emergency medical technicians (EMTs) working in the emergency room and establish the factors related to poor post-assault-exposure response. @*Methods@#In this multicenter study, we conducted a survey of EMTs working in the emergency rooms. Response after assault was measured by Likert 5-point scale; the data of the participants were divided based on the median score. The demographic characteristics, hospital preparedness, and the characteristics of the assault were analyzed. Afterwards, the data of the risk factors for poor post-assault-exposure response were subjected to multivariable logistic analysis. @*Results@#Of the 141 study participants, 84 (59.6%) were women. Most of them had experienced verbal violence (n=137, 97.2%) and physical threats (n=137, 92.2%), and 96 (68.0%) had experienced physical assault in the past year. The results of the multivariable logistic regression analysis revealed that female sex (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 6.152; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.687-14.120) and the increase in the number of physical assaults (aOR, 1.160; 95% CI, 1.036- 1.298) were associated with a poor response. @*Conclusion@#Considering the importance of the EMTs in the emergency medical system and the potential adverse effects on the status of their health and services, the provision of appropriate support to female EMTs and the active intervention for attenuation of physical assault escalation in case of aggressive situations is needed. Our present results can be used for the identification and resolution of the underlying causes of these problems.
ABSTRACT
The present study performed an experiment to validate the histogram summation technique developed for measurement error minimization of respiratory air flow rate2). Five sets of manual stroke operation data(MSO#1 5) of 1 [LI each were acquired at varying speeds. Selected sets of these data were used to estimate the conductance correction factors reflecting the resistance-flow character -istics. Then the correction factors were applied to different sets of the data to evaluate mean SD of the volume measurement error. When the resistance was linearly compensated without conductance correction, the relative error was 2.3% marginally within the ATS standard limit of 3%. With the histogram summation techinque applied, it has dramatically decreased down to within 1%. For a newly input flow data, the error was maintained within 1.5%. Therefore, the histogram summation techinque minimized the measurement error consistently and reproducibly. With increased number of strokes included in the correction factor estimation process, the error decreased at a rate of 0.5 [mL!S0strokesj. However, no more than 50 stroke data were necessary to keep the measurement error within 1.5%. This corresponded to only 25 MSO, thus the histogram summation technique has been demonstrated to be consistent, reproducible, and practical technique for measurement error minimization of respiratory air flow rate.