Emergency physician awareness of prehospital procedures and medications.

Introduction: Maintaining patient safety during transition from prehospital to emergency department (ED) care depends on effective handoff communication between providers. We sought to determine emergency physicians' (EP) knowledge of the care provided by paramedics in terms of both procedures and medications, and whether the use of a verbal report improved physician accuracy.

Methods: We conducted a 2-phase observational survey of a convenience sample of EPs in an urban, academic ED.

Effect of gender on prehospital refusal of medical aid.

Background: "Refusal of medical aid" (RMA) is the term commonly used by emergency medical technicians (EMTs) when someone calls 911 for care (usually the patient or a family member) but, after the initial encounter with the EMTs, the patient refuses emergency medical services transport to the hospital. Some intervention may have been performed, such as taking vital signs or an electrocardiogram, before the RMA. Although there have been multiple studies of the characteristics and outcomes of patients who RMA, little analysis has been done of the role of EMTs in these cases.

Difficulty breathing: agreement of paramedic and emergency physician diagnoses.

Objective: To determine the diagnostic accuracy of paramedics treating patients who have called an ambulance for "difficulty breathing."

Methods: A retrospective study of all ambulance call reports generated by one ambulance over a one-year period with the dispatch complaint of "difficulty breathing" taken to the hospital. The paramedic diagnosis on the call report was compared with the emergency department (ED) physician diagnosis, which was used as the "gold standard.