Prehospital care and new models of regionalization.
This article summarizes the discussions of the emergency medical services (EMS) breakout session at the June 2010 Academic Emergency Medicine consensus conference "Beyond Regionalization: Integrated Networks of Emergency Care." The group focused on prehospital issues such as the identification of patients by EMS personnel, protocol-driven destination selection, bypassing closer nondesignated centers to transport patients directly to more distant designated specialty centers, and the modes of transport to be used as they relate to the regionalization of emergency care. It is our hope that the proposed research agenda will be advanced in a way that begins to rigorously approach the unanswered research questions and that these answers, in turn, will lead to an evidence-based, cohesive, comprehensive, and more uniform set of guidelines that govern the delivery and practice of prehospital emergency care.
Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA. david.cone@yale.edu
David C
DC
Cone
E
E
Brooke Lerner
Roger A
RA
Band
Chris
C
Renjilian
Bentley J
BJ
Bobrow
C
C
Crawford Mechem
Alix J E
AJ
Carter
Douglas F
DF
Kupas
Daniel W
DW
Spaite
D002391:Catchment Area, Health; D003153:Community Health Services / Q000379:methods / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003659:Decision Making, Organizational; D004632:Emergency Medical Services / Q000379:methods* / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006302:Health Services Research; D006801:Humans; D020380:Needs Assessment / Q000458:organization & administration; D014218:Triage / Q000458:organization & administration; D014481:United States