Association of out of hospital paediatric early warning score with need for hospital admission in a Scottish emergency ambulance population.

Objective: Physiological derangement, as measured by paediatric early warning score (PEWS) is used to identify children with critical illness at an early point to identify and intervene in children at risk. PEWS has shown some utility as a track and trigger system in hospital and also as a predictor of adverse outcome both in and out of hospital. This study examines the relationship between prehospital observations, aggregated into an eight-point PEWS (Scotland), and hospital admission.

Training paramedics in focussed echo in life support.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine whether paramedics can be trained to perform and interpret focussed Echo in Life Support (ELS) for the assessment of cardiac movement and the recognition of reversible causes of cardiac arrest.

Methods: This study is a prospective observational pilot study. Data were collected during a 1-day course training 11 paramedics to perform ELS scans on healthy volunteers.