Meet our writers

Win $1,000







Health May 2012

Aid for Age

Hospitals on Wheels

By Tait Trussell

Today, a number of emergency responders are equipping ambulances with new technological equipment, such as digital transmission systems to beam electrocardiograms directly to the hospital emergency room doctors. Some ambulances now have fast-clotting bandages developed by medical advances in the Iraq War to stop bleeding quicker.

Whirrrrl! The moan of an ambulance siren. An emergency case is headed for the hospital.

An estimated 300,000 deaths occur in the U.S. ever year from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

It’s the leading cause of death among adults — usually seniors – in the U.S. and Western countries.

Every year approximately 785,000 Americans suffer a first heart attack. And 470,000 who have already had one or more heart attacks have another one.

A heart attack and cardiac arrest are often confused. A heart attack refers to damage to the heart muscle, usually from a lack of blood flow. As the heart muscle starves, it begins to die.

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart stops pumping blood. With no pumping action, the blood pressure drops. Blood is no longer forced into the organs of the body. Anyone should recognize a heart attack and get help immediately to avoid cardiac arrest.

Emergency medical systems and ambulance companies, in a growing number of communities, are being supplied with new life-saving equipment and are training their 911 call centers to tell people by phone the best way to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

More and more communities are served by high-performance emergency ambulance service providers with records of delivering clinical excellence and response time reliability. The number of ambulance services in the U.S. tops 15,000. The number of ambulances exceeds 48,000. And the number of Emergency Medical Service (EMS) personnel totals nearly 840,700.

Ambulances also “are operating at a heightened state of readiness and are working to build the necessary capacity to respond to new homeland security threats such a bio-terrorism attacks,” according to the American Ambulance Association.

Ambulance providers also face financial challenges because of skimpy Medicare payments and barriers to getting federal homeland security funds.

A program known as CARES stands for Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival. It’s a collaborative effort of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Heart Association (AHA), and the Emory University Department of Emergency Medicine section of Pre-hospital and Disaster Medicine.

The goals of CARES are to help local emergency medical service (EMS) administrators and medical directors determine when and where cardiac arrest events happen and how to improve cardiac arrest outcomes.

Today, a number of emergency responders are equipping ambulances with new technological equipment, such as digital transmission systems to beam electrocardiograms directly to the hospital emergency room doctors. Some ambulances now have fast-clotting bandages developed by medical advances in the Iraq War to stop bleeding quicker.

For cardiac arrest patients, paramedics are being trained to chill these endangered patients after they have been resuscitated. This procedure has been found to increase the patient’s chance of
surviving without brain damage.

A story in The Wall Street Journal on emergency treatment quoted Andreas Grabinsky, director of emergency and trauma anesthesia at the University of Washington-Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, as saying: “The goal is to train the paramedics to be as good as physicians when treating patients in the field.”

The city and county EMS providers offer free training programs to other emergency systems, the story said.

In Gwinnett County, Georgia, for example, two cardiology practices funded an advanced technology system in all county hospital ambulances. The LifeNet system will enable EMS crews to transmit highly detailed cardiovascular data to Gwinnett Medical Center’s emergency department, which can then be forwarded directly to a mobile device of the appropriate physician.

I’m fortunate to live in an area served by West Shore Medical Center, about 8 miles from my home in northern Michigan. The hospital’s ambulances are equipped with the latest technology, according to Wayne Beldo, emergency medical service (EMS) manager at the hospital.

His ambulances have electrocardiograms (EKGs) to monitor heart conditions. If the EKG shows the patient is having a heart attack, the ambulance goes directly to larger, more fully equipped Munson Hospital 60 miles away (“a trip we can make in 45 minutes”) for an immediate operation. Its ambulances also have ventilators for providing oxygen, and means of communicating with emergency room doctors at any time.

Beldo’s ambulances also are equipped with “stair chairs” for ease in carrying patients from, say an upstairs bedroom — much less awkward than maneuvering a stretcher.

Beldo urged that any patient with a chest pain or difficulty breathing should call for the EMS people. “We will come out and runs some tests to determine if it is just indigestion or a heart problem and take appropriate action.”

Minutes count when dealing with heart conditions.

 

Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.

Meet Tait