Accuracy of prehospital clinicians' perceived prognostication of long-term survival in critically ill patients: a nationwide retrospective cohort study on helicopter emergency service patients.

OBJECTIVES: Prehospital critical care physicians regularly attend to patients with poor prognosis and may limit the advanced therapies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of poor prognosis given by prehospital critical care clinicians. DESIGN: Cohort study. SETTING: We performed a retrospective cohort study using the national helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) quality database. PARTICIPANTS: Patients classified by the HEMS clinician to have survived until hospital admission solely because of prehospital interventions but evaluated as having no long-term survival by prehospital clinician, were included. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME: The survival of the study patients was examined at 30 days, 1 year and 3 years. RESULTS: Of 36 715 patients encountered by the HEMS during the study period, 2053 patients were classified as having no long-term survival and included. At 30 days, 713 (35%, 95% CI 33% to 37%) were still alive and 69 were lost to follow-up. Furthermore, at 1 year 524 (26%) and at 3 years 267 (13%) of the patients were still alive. The deceased patients received more often prehospital rapid sequence intubation and vasoactives, compared with patients alive at 30 days. Patients deceased at 30 days were older and had lower initial Glasgow Coma Scores. Otherwise, no clinically relevant difference was found in the prehospital vital parameters between the survivors and non-survivors. CONCLUSIONS: The prognostication of long-term survival for critically ill patients by a prehospital critical care clinician seems to fulfil only moderately. A prognosis based on clinical judgement must be handled with a great degree of caution and decision on limitation of advanced care should be made cautiously.

The development of emergency medical services benefit score: a European Delphi study.

BACKGROUND: The helicopter emergency services (HEMS) Benefit Score (HBS) is a nine-level scoring system developed to evaluate the benefits of HEMS missions. The HBS has been in clinical use for two decades in its original form. Advances in prehospital care, however, have produced demand for a revision of the HBS. Therefore, we developed the emergency medical services (EMS) Benefit Score (EBS) based on the former HBS. As reflected by its name, the aim of the EBS is to measure the benefits produced by the whole EMS systems to patients. METHODS: This is a four-round, web-based, international Delphi consensus study with a consensus definition made by experts from seven countries. Participants reviewed items of the revised HBS on a 5-point Likert scale. A content validity index (CVI) was calculated, and agreement was defined as a 70% CVI. Study included experts from seven European countries. Of these, 18 were prehospital expert panellists and 11 were in-hospital commentary board members. RESULTS: The first Delphi round resulted in 1248 intervention examples divided into ten diagnostic categories. After removing overlapping examples, 413 interventions were included in the second Delphi round, which resulted in 38 examples divided into HBS categories 3-8. In the third Delphi round, these resulted in 37 prehospital interventions, examples of which were given revised version of the score. In the fourth and final Delphi round, the expert panel was given an opportunity to accept or comment on the revised scoring system. CONCLUSIONS: The former HBS was revised by a Delphi methodology and EBS developed to represent its structural purpose better. The EBS includes 37 exemplar prehospital interventions to guide its clinical use. Trial registration The study permission was requested and granted by Turku University Hospital (decision number TP2/010/18).

Physician staffed emergency medical service for children: a retrospective population-based registry cohort study in Odense region, Southern Denmark.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study is to determine diagnostic patterns in the prehospital paediatric population, age distribution, the level of monitoring and the treatment initiated in the prehospital paediatric case. Hypothesis was that advanced prehospital interventions are rare in the paediatric patient population. SETTING: We performed a retrospective population-based registry cohort study of children attended by a physician-staffed emergency medical service (EMS) unit (P-EMS), in the Odense area of Denmark during a 10-year study period. PARTICIPANTS: We screened 44 882 EMS contacts and included 5043 children. Patient characteristics, monitoring and interventions performed by the P-EMS crews were determined. RESULTS: We found that paediatric patients were a minority among patients attended by P-EMS units: 11.2% (10.9 to 11.5) (95% CI) of patients were children. The majority of the children were <5 years old; one-third being <2 years old. Respiratory problems, traffic accidents and febrile seizures were the three most common dispatch codes. Oxygen supplementation, intravenous access and application of a cervical collar were the three most common interventions. Oxygen saturation and heart rate were documented in more than half of the cases, but more than one-third of the children had no vital parameters documented. Only 22% of the children had respiratory rate, saturation, heart rate and blood pressure documented. Prehospital invasive procedures such as tracheal intubation (n=74), intraosseous access (n=22) and chest drainage (n=2) were infrequently performed. CONCLUSION: Prehospital paediatric contacts are uncommon, more frequently involving smaller children. Monitoring or at least documentation of basic vital parameters is infrequent and may be an area for improvement. Advanced and potentially life-saving prehospital interventions provide a dilemma since these likely occur too infrequently to allow service providers to maintain their technical skills working solely in the prehospital environment.