RESUMO
Objectives: The concept of the necessity of a good quality assurance (QA) plan for emergency medical services (EMS) is well-accepted, guide-lines as how best to achieve this and how current systems operate have not been defined. The purpose of this study was to survery EMS systems to discover current methods, used to perform medical control and QA and to examine whether the existence of an emergency medicine residency offected these components Methods: a survery was mailed in 1989 to the major teaching hospitals associated with all of the emergency medicine residency programs and all other hospitals with greater than 350 beds within the 50 largest United States metropolitan areas. The survery consisted of questions concerning four general EMS-QA Categories: 1) general informaction, 2) prospective, 3) immediate and 4) retrospective medical control. Conclusion: This survery characterizes some of the current methods utilized nationwide in EMS-QA programs. Further research is needed to determine the effectiveness of these various methods, and to develop a model program (AU)
