Patient Safety - Relevant in Emergency Medical Services?

Aspects of patient safety have gained a growing interest in acute patient care since the late nineties. Structured concepts for patient safety and risk management have not yet been widely established in German emergency medical services (EMS). Discussed below are the results of a survey among a sample of emergency medical physicians and technicians with a great amount of professional experience. Relevance of the topic, potential sources of error and implementation of patient safety measures were evaluated. Both occupational groups regarded actions at EMS' interfaces, e. g. emergency medical dispatching and patient handover in hospitals as error prone. Almost one half of the sample rated communication and teamwork as critical for the occurrence of error. Issues of patient safety were considered as having major importance. Establishing standardised dispatch protocols was regarded the most important step towards patient safety. Results are compared to the few existing data and proposals for improvement in this area are illustrated.