Solo emergency care by a physician assistant versus an ambulance nurse: a cross-sectional document study.

Background: This study compares the assessment, treatment, referral, and follow up contact with the dispatch centre of emergency patients treated by two types of solo emergency care providers in ambulance emergency medical services (EMS) in the Netherlands: the physician assistant (PA), educated in the medical domain, and the ambulance registered nurse (RN), educated in the nursing domain. The hypothesis of this study was that there is no difference in outcome of care between the patients of PAs and RNs.

Methods: In a cross-sectional document study in two EMS regions we included 991 patients, treated by two PAs (n = 493) and 23 RNs (n = 498).