The foundation of emergency medical services is based on a system that allows emergency personnel to respond to medical and surgical emergencies in an efficient manner. However, the system we know today hasn’t always been as efficient. There have been numerous advances that have shaped the EMS system today including training dispatch operations, creating a national scope of practice and guidelines for emergency medical technician and paramedics, as well as standardizing training for EMS personnel. 1 In countries around the world, EMTs and paramedics are not the only personnel responding to calls, more advanced personnel, including physicians, on EMS vehicles are a standard practice unlike in the United States. The objective of this study is to investigate whether the implementation of physician assistants on emergency medical service vehicles affects patient outcomes. The emergency type that was selected for this study was an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest as they are one of the most well-studied emergencies in the United States. The development of EMS guidelines has helped target out-of-hospital emergencies including cardiac arrests. The implementation of the “chain of survival” has been shown to have higher survival rates when implemented early and optimized.
The proposal of this study entails physician-assistant EMS vehicles to respond to cardiac arrests in the Boston area over a twelve-month period with follow-up for at three end points including three, six, and twelve months. The goal for the patient population is approximately 2,000 participants and utilizes software that will dispatch either a physician assistant-EMS or a paramedic unit that will practice under their scopes of practice and under the Massachusetts State protocols for cardiac arrests. The study will use electronic medical records from the Boston EMS EMR as well as from the receiving facility and will determine if there is a statistical difference in patient outcomes between the physician assistant unit and the traditional paramedic unit.
This study is novel in that it is the first of its kind to study the utilization of physician assistants in the pre-hospital emergency medical setting. This study would explore the idea of integrating PAs in more capabilities than those in the hospital setting and how this could affect patient outcomes overall.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/49479 |
| Date | 08 November 2024 |
| Creators | Patel, Jennie |
| Contributors | Tzizik, Dan, Weinstein, John |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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