Assessing an Education Bundle's Impact on Paramedic Treatment of Respiratory Distress Patients
- 1 minBundles of care have been advocated as a process based system to improve patient care and outcomes using evidence-based guidelines; in-hospital care bundles have been developed for critical care conditions like sepsis and prehospital data shows better patient outcomes when critical advanced life support (ALS) interventions are accomplished in the field.
I assisted in the data analysis and visualization of a study which assessed the effectiveness of the implementation of a prehospital “Crashing Patient” Critical Intervention Bundle of Care on the performance of key prehospital interventions for patients presenting with respiratory distress. We hypothesized that the implementation of a prehospital “Crashing Patient” Critical Bundle of Care would improve execution of core ALS interventions for patients presenting with respiratory distress and decrease the incidence of post EMS contact cardiac arrest for these patients. A Crashing Patients Program was fully implemented with a variety of continuing educational methods for an urban, ALS, municipal EMS agency which responds to over 63,000 calls for service per year. For all electronic patient care reports coded with a complaint of “Respiratory Distress” from July, 2014, to June, 2017, core interventioned were measure for all cases and medication administration for patients receiveing Albuterol or Atrovent were measured.
Data analysis revealed a significant increase in all core performance measures for bronchospasm, significant increase in the use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), and a non-significant decrease in the overall incidence of post-EMS-contact cardiac arrest. We further concluded that the implementation of a prehospital “Crashing Patient” Critical Invervention Bundle of Care resulted in significant increases of monitoring, medication administration, and airway interventions.
Tom Goode
Data Scientist & EMS Researcher