St. Emlyn´s - April 19, 2016 - By Natalie May
"Good quality, practice-changing prehospital research is difficult to come by for a number of reasons, not least the fact that the standalone specialty itself is in relative infancy. Issues of consent and ethics, combined with the very urgent nature of most of the prehospital care we are interested in undertaking research into, make it very tricky to design and conduct a robust study in the prehospital arena, leaving aside the fact that most of the outcomes of interest occur in hospitals which may be run by entirely different agencies who may (or may not) be cooperative but who will, in any case, need to buy into the aims and methods of the study.
So it’s been great to see two papers electronically published in the last couple of weeks in prominent journals, both of which were conducted in the prehospital environment and both of which address controversies in the care of patients in cardiac arrest...
What Can We Take From These Studies?
Let’s remember first and foremost that prehospital research is difficult – we should salute and thank these authors for working hard to contribute to our understanding of prehospital practice.
What both of these papers emphasise is the importance of doing the simple things well. The chain of survival, simple as it is, is still relevant to clinical practice. A great example of how to put this into practice comes from the NW Resus Group, a fantastic paramedic-led initiative which brings together clinicians of all disciplines (including police and fire services) to break down and work on the key skills needed to give our patients the best chance of survival. If you’re based in the NW of England, please try to get along to support them at one of their meetings."