Quality and safety in prehospital airway management - retrospective analysis of 18,000 cases from an air rescue database in Germany.

Background: Prehospital airway management remains crucial with regard to the quality and safety of emergency medical service (EMS) systems worldwide. In 2007, the benchmark study by Timmermann et al. hit the German EMS community hard by revealing a significant rate of undetected oesophageal intubations leading to an often-fatal outcome.

Learning motivation and self-assessment in health economics: a survey on overconfidence in healthcare providers.

Introduction: Lifelong learning is the foundation for professionals to maintain competence and proficiency in several aspects of economy and medicine. Until now, there is no evidence of overconfidence (the belief to be better than others or tested) and clinical tribalism (the belief that one's own group outperforms others) in the specialty of health economics. We investigated the hypothesis of overconfidence effects and their relation to learning motivation and motivational patterns in healthcare providers regarding healthcare economics.

Second Victims among German Emergency Medical Services Physicians (SeViD-III-Study).

Background: Patient care in the prehospital emergency setting is error-prone. Wu's publications on the second victim syndrome made very clear that medical errors may lead to severe emotional injury on the caregiver's part. So far, little is known about the extent of the problem within the field of prehospital emergency care.