There's a line from a science fiction novel that, to me, captures the drama of applied research. In William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, an unknown person or persons are publishing video fragments online one at a time—pieces of a larger story, discovered at random on hidden sites on the internet. Taken together, these fragments are known as "the footage." In the book, whole online forums are devoted to discovering who is publishing the videos and why. One of the ongoing debates concerns "progressives" versus "completists"...
Alertness is important to assess during many medical emergencies; however, assessing alertness proves difficult in a non-visual emergency dispatch environment. Little is understood about how to best gather an accurate report of patient alertness during an interaction between callers and Emergency Medical Dispatchers (EMDs). The primary objective of the study was to compare two versions of a Key Question (KQ) intended to gain an accurate report of alertness, to determine whether either demonstrates a higher degree of caller...
Opioid overdoses have reached crisis proportions. One response has been to increase the availability of naloxone HCl (commonly referred to by the generic name naloxone), which reverses the effects of opioid overdose. The Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS®) includes instructions by which the Emergency Medical Dispatcher (EMD) can prompt the caller to find and use naloxone on overdose victims. However, these instructions are only provided on dispatch Chief Complaint (CC) Protocols on which overdoses are expected to be handled...
Situational awareness (SA, also called situation awareness) is the ability to take in relevant information about an event in order to understand it and take effective action. Maintaining effective SA as an emergency medical dispatcher (EMD) may be more difficult than in other, similarly complex roles because of the remote nature of an emergency call for help. This study attempts to provide insight on one remote SA situation by reporting on a simulation study in which cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) instructions were provided over...
It has long been anecdotally held by emergency responders that non-medical emergency responders were less willing to accept post-incident intervention following a personally disturbing event than their medical counterparts. Aspects of emergency responder stress were studied across multiple disciplines of the emergency services: pre-hospital emergency medical services (EMS), fire protection, law enforcement, and emergency department (ED) or emergency room (ER) personnel. Individual anonymous surveys were administered across the...
