Examining the Existing Role of the Emergency Medical Service Provider

they must send them to another hospitals ED. Ambulances can drive around for unnecessary amounts of time trying to find a hospital with room in the emergency department for their victim. This can be scary for the victim. They present a huge health risk for patients seeking urgent medical attention. Ambulance diversions wouldn’t be an issue if overcrowding did not exist. Schull (2003) believes that ambulance diversion is driven by the boarding of patients and is not otherwise related to issues of staffing within the ED itself. (p.467-476)

With the ever-growing metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the increasing number of people aging into the geriatric community, hospitals and ground ambulance services are being used more than ever. This means that safe and effective care is needed more now than ever before, and therefore we need more services such as Life Link III. This air ambulance service can bring people from outside the metro area to a healthcare facility with ease and excellence. Their safety standards are through the roof, and they’re able to provide their services to different parts of country, flying patients from Minnesota to various specialty centers in the country so that they can receive the best care possible. This paper will discuss how the nurse can provide safe and effective care while also promoting the quickest healing time possible.

Paramedics are emergency medical technicians more commonly known as EMT’s. EMT’s provide emergency treatment for the ill or injured on a scene and during en route to a medical facility. EMT’s are called upon at all hours of the day or night; typically the first medical specialist that a patient will call upon in an emergency. Paramedics are trained to provide lifesaving pre-hospital care in emergency situations. The range of medical services varies according to the level of training and/or certification.

Emergency Medical Technicians are the ones that respond to emergency calls, perform medical services, and transport patients to medical facilities. (“Summary.”) The idea of transporting an injured individual in a hurry has been

When focusing on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Systems strategies for improvement with unnecessary emergency room visits, a major key area is accessibility to health care at the appropriate health care setting. For many years, there has been the perception that the emergency department is the only place for someone who is uninsured or underinsured can go to receive the needed and appropriate health care, and in some situations that may be the case. (Rhodes et al, 2013, p.394) Due to the decreases in reimbursements for the publicly funded, more and more physicians are opting out to treating these patients, thus leading to an increase in emergency department utilization. According to a study conducted by Rhodes, Bisgaier, Lawson, Soglen, Krug, and Haitsma, this is becoming a greater concern for the

S (situation): Hi, my name Kelsey and I am a nurse in the emergency department. I am calling about Shannon O’Reilly’s most recent laboratory results.

In many cities emergency service personnel had their pay cut, overtime eliminated, and benefits slashed. This not only affects the moral of said workers but may drive away future applicants to find better pay elsewhere. This can cause many problems in the future as they will have a difficult time to hire new employees. It could also cause current employees to leave their departments for better pay causing more man power issues. “The national average wage was $34,370 in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Mercer 2).” One of the major problems is that there is no federal funding for emergency medicine. The lack of funding for these emergency medicine personnel is a major concern leading to a haphazard development of this service. “Even the number of EMTs and paramedics is uncertain (Mercer 11).” Many believe that if you stabilize the budget issues then the profession would possibly become one of the fastest growing in the

Any patient brought into the Emergency Department, is first signed in at ED receptionist desk and triaged by a triage nurse, prioritized and brought to patient room by a charged nurse either by wheelchair or stretcher or walking by the patient depending on patient’s illness. A nurse is assigned to the patient. Emergency Doctor comes in and if the patient illness is life threatening it is stabilized and the Doctor orders test such as blood work and x-ray if necessary to be conducted. Based on the test result the patient is either discharged or admitted. Certain times the emergency department is filled with a lot of patient that there is no place to sit and patients keep coming in and creating

There are different skilled are required for working in EMS like EMS worker must have the ability to tackle high stress, anxiety, because it is the job that can be fast paced as well as emotional and physically demands. EMS needs to be strong because they have to lift patients and lift heavy equipment from one place to another. On the other side, EMS worker must have better ability of communication, so that they can teach patients about their disease situation and teach them how to take medicine on required time.

NSW MINISTRY OF HEALTH 73 Miller Street NORTH SYDNEY NSW 2060 Tel. (02) 9391 9000 Fax. (02) 9391 9101 TTY. (02) 9391 9900 www.health.nsw.gov.au This work is copyright. It may be reproduced in whole or in part for study or training purposes subject to the inclusion of an acknowledgement of the source. It may not be reproduced for commercial usage or sale. Reproduction for purposes other than those indicated above requires written permission from the NSW Ministry of Health. © NSW Ministry of Health 2012 SHPN (HSPI) 120204 Further copies of this document can be downloaded from the NSW Health website www.health.nsw.gov.au or Emergency Care Institute NSW website www.ecinsw.com.au August 2012

This is a review of Emergency Management: The American Experience 1900-2010 by Claire B. Rubin and Butler (2012), chapters 1 and 2. Emergency management at the federal level was nonexistent before 1950 when the Federal Disaster relief Act was passed. Disaster relief was the responsibility of state and volunteer agencies like the Red Cross. Several disasters paved the way for emergency management. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the San Frisco Earthquake of 1906, and the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 were the disasters that laid the foundation for the 1950 Federal Disaster relief Act (Butler, 2012, pg. 17).

Emergency medical technicians are licensed and/or certified health-care providers that are out-of-hospital. They immediately respond to the scene of an emergency, assess the safety hazards of the scene, and transport patients to institutions. (Beck, 2013) An emergency medical technician-paramedic takes on the additional tasks of giving medication and using various complex equipment. The competence and hasty reactions of EMTs can save the lives of patients and get them to the emergency room physician. Although education differs state to state, every emergency medical technician-paramedic must receive a high school diploma or GED and become certified for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). (“Emts and paramedics,” 2014) They must also

The Emergency Medical Service(EMS) are the people who will usually respond to a 911 call relating to medical emergency.

Thus, emergency physicians cannot rely on earned trust or on prior knowledge of the patient's condition, values, or wishes regarding medical treatment. The patient's willingness to seek emergency care and to trust the physician is based on institutional and professional assurances rather than on an established personal relationship. Fourth, emergency physicians practice in an institutional setting, the hospital emergency department, and in close working relationships with other physicians, nurses, emergency medical technicians, and other health care professionals. Thus, emergency physicians must understand and respect institutional regulations and inter-professional norms of conduct. Fifth, in the United States, emergency physicians have been given a unique social role and responsibility to act as health care providers of last resort for many patients who have no other feasible access to care. Sixth, emergency physicians have a societal duty to render emergency aid outside their normal health care setting when such intervention may save life or limb. Finally, by virtue of their broad expertise and training, emergency physicians are expected to be a resource for the community in pre-hospital care, disaster management, toxicology, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, public health, injury control, and related areas. All of these special circumstances shape the

Safe, effective, patient-centered care delivered in a timely and efficient manner is the goal of quality healthcare. Unfortunately, the delivery of such quality faces serious concerns. The Institute of Medicine (2001) describes the quality gap in healthcare as having three types of problems, “overuse, underuse, and misuse” (p. 23). In recent years, emphasis on improving the quality of care has increased (IOM, 2001). Quality improvement methods, such as plan-do-study-act (PDSA), have successfully enabled health care providers to address the quality gap. The purpose of this paper is to identify a quality healthcare problem, discuss the quality improvement plan, and describe the strategy for implementing effective change using the PDSA method.