Background: Search and rescue (SAR) operations constitute a significant proportion of Norwegian ambulance helicopter missions, and they may limit the service’s capacity for medical operations. We compared the relative contribution of the different helicopter resources using a common definition of SAR-operation in order to investigate how the SAR workload had changed over the last years. Methods: We ...

<i>Background</i> - Few studies have investigated the patient compartment temperatures during ambulance missions or its relation to admission hypothermia. Still hypothermia is a known risk factor for increased mortality and morbidity in both trauma and disease. This has special relevance to our sub-arctic region’s pre-hospital services, and we prospectively studied the environmental temperature in ...

Introduction: The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics’ (NACA) severity score is widely used in pre-hospital emergency medicine to grade the severity of illness or trauma in patient groups but is scarcely validated. The aim of this study was to assess the score’s ability to predict mortality and need for advanced in-hospital interventions in a cohort from one anaesthesiologistmanned helicopter ...

Background: Admission with a multidisciplinary trauma team may be vital for the severely injured patient, as this facilitates rapid diagnosis and treatment. On the other hand, patients with minor injuries do not need the trauma team for adequate care. Correct triage is important for optimal resource utilization. The aim of the study was to evaluate our criteria for activating the trauma team, and ...

The effective treatment of airway compromise in trauma and non-trauma patients is important. Hypoxia and hypotension are predictors of negative patient outcomes and increased mortality, and may be important quality indicators of care provided by emergency medical services. Excluding cardiac arrests, critical trauma and non-trauma patients remain the two major groups to which helicopter emergency ...

<p><i>Background - </i>Quality of bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) skills may influence out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) outcomes. We analyzed how the level of CPR training related to indicators of good CPR quality and also the relationship between self-reported skills and actual CPR performance. <p><i>Methods - </i>Two hundred thirty-seven persons trained in standardized BLS ...

Background: The patient handover is important for the safe transition from the pre-hospital setting to secondary care. The loss of critical information about the pre-hospital phase may impact upon the clinical course of the patient. Methods: University Hospital Emergency Care registrars answered a questionnaire about how they perceive clinical documentation from the ambulance services. We also ...