Presentation of the Prehospital Emergency Research Network and an analysis of bibliometric indicators for scientific productivity in out-of-hospital care.

Through research we advance scientific understanding and its application in medical practice. Many of the advances in out-of-hospital emergency care are extracted from hospital settings, perhaps because of the difficulties inherent to our prehospital environments: heterogeneity, obstacles to data collection, biases not controlled for, among other limitations. Research networks offer opportunities to create connections among researchers and facilitate homogeneous data collection.

Potential capacity of an emergency dispatch center to predict COVID-19-related hospital and intensive care unit admissions.

Objectives: To analyze the association between the perceived care demand in the emergency call center of Castilla La Mancha (and hospital and ICU admissions for COVID-19, as well as their temporal characteristics, to explore its potential capacity as a predictive tool for COVID hospital admissions.

Material And Methods: Retrospective observational study on the daily calls made to the emergency call center of Castilla La Mancha, both calls to 112 and those made to COVID line, in the period between March 1 and October 14, 2020. The data were analyzed by codes "diarrhea", "dyspnea", "fever" and "general discomfort" that were used as predictor variables, and their relationship with hospital admissions and ICU admissions.