Good idea, perhaps best for the sickest with the longest travel times. The many logistic considerations might include degree of certainty of diagnosis, drug allergy history, instant access to various antibiotics, help with selection of antibiotics by an experienced physician, buy-in by the receiving medical centers, compromise of culture results, adequacy of IV access to handle antibiotics without compromise of fluid administration.
Ron Elkin MD California Pacific Medical Center San Francisco On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 4:31 AM, Josie Gray <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi there, > > I am a third year student Paramedic, studying at the University of > Brighton. An assignment we have been given involves researching and > suggesting an improvement our local ambulance service can make to improve > patient care. > > I recently attended a male suffering signs of severe sepsis. He had been > getting progressively worse following an untreated chest infection and had > been in the condition we found him for around 3 hours before his wife > decided to call an Ambulance. > > We initiated a fluid challenge and took him to A&E under a blue light > priority. Along with all our regular checks. > > My thoughts from this were, had paramedics been allowed to give broad > spectrum antibiotics, would this have been of benefit to the patient at all > as apposed to receiving these in hospital, considering his potential to > deteriorate rapidly? Our transport time being 20-25 minutes. And would this > have given the hospital more time to complete other tasks required for this > patient, e.g blood cultures, imaging etc and enable him to get the care he > needs as quickly as possible? > > I would be very grateful for your opinion on this and if you would have > any suggestions or recommendations I could research into, on what more the > Ambulance service can do for this group of patients? > > Kind Regards, > Josie Gray > > Third year student Paramedic, > University of Brighton. > _______________________________________________ > Sepsisgroups mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.sepsisgroups.org/listinfo.cgi/sepsisgroups-sepsisgroups.org >
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