Analysis of Emergency Medical Services

Emergency Preparedness
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Emergency Preparedness
Emergency medical services (EMS) are emergency services that provide critical pre-hospital treatment and stabilization to people in mass exposure incidents. The purpose of this essay is to develop a training program for emergency preparedness, especially pre-hospital decontamination protocols that utilize the information garnered from the effective and ineffective programs which currently exist. The problem being addressed is how to improve EMS’s emergency preparedness in terms of pre-hospital decontamination protocols. This issue is important because caring for patients on the scene of a mass exposure incident, who have been contaminated by hazardous materials, requires effective pre-hospital decontamination protocols to protect both the patient and the responder. This essay proposes three solutions to improving EMS’s emergency preparedness and ability to respond to hazardous materials incidents.
The first solution this essay proposes is enhancing EMS’s system-wide coordination of patient decontamination. EMS should improve its ability to anticipate self-evacuation from a hazardous materials incident scene prior to decontamination as well as capacity to develop a synchronized whole community response to control the whole spectrum of patients (Kenar, 2004). This spectrum of patients include ambulatory and non-ambulatory patients who first arrived at the scene after the mass exposure incident and became exposed (e.g., bystanders and news reporter); patients who travelled to a healthcare facility without the assistance of responders; and those who left the scene but did not seek care or sought care much later after the onset of signs and symptoms. A formal rapid communication system should be instituted to provide advance notice of a mass exposure incident to regional healthcare facilities about the possibility of all the three groups of patients arriving unannounced to healthcare facilities and needing evaluation of contamination. Communication systems must be both multi-directional and interoperable.
EMS should also develop a pre-scripted template to be used during decontamination planning efforts. Examples of critical information requirements include initial scene appraisal, identity of the involved hazardous materials and their toxicity, typically observed signs and symptoms, triage categories, status of patient decontamination, projected patient population requiring transport, as well as patient decontamination efforts currently being performed at the scene (Moccia et al., 2020). Updates from the regional healthcare facilities receiving self-evacuated patients should include status of facility’s decontamination efforts, hospital capacity to implement decontamination efforts, delayed symptoms observed, and hospital laboratory test results for chemical identification and toxicity. EMS must plan for decontamination of ambulatory, non-ambulatory, and at-risk populations. Additional planning must be made for at-risk individuals such as infants, pregnant women, and the elderly who are likely to have mobility impairments, limited English proficiency, cognitive impairments, or live in congregated and institutionalized settings (OPEM, 2014).
The second solution this essay proposes is improving EMS’s ability to evaluate the effectiveness of decontamination efforts and efficiency of decontamination operations. It is critical for EMS to have effective pre-hospital decontamination protocols for de...