Background and Aims:

An Emergency Medical Service (EMS) can be defined as “a comprehensive system which provides the arrangements of personnel, facilities and equipment for the effective, coordinated and timely delivery of health and safety services to victims of sudden illness or injury.” EMS focuses on providing timely care to victims of sudden and life-threatening injuries or emergencies in order to prevent mortality or long-term morbidity. The aims of the study are to define EMS Ecosystem and to analyse in order to define gaps and challenges of EMS.

Materials and Methods:

This is a review study conducted under IProcureSecurity Project (GA: 833291). EMS Ecosystem is predefined by the project consortium members that consist of mainly experienced EMS providers from 7 countries (Austria, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Turkey) in a face to face workshop. Nineteen key words for literature review is selected in the same meeting. Partners made a broad literature review and add the resources to project system. These consists of; scholarly articles, thesis, online books and reports. More than 150 literature reviewed.

Results:

EMS gaps and challenges analyses is started after an EMS Ecosystem figure provided by the partners. This figure helped to design a contextual framework and perform the literature review correlated. The analyses phases started after concluded “EMS History” part. The analysed parts under EMS Ecosystem are; EMS Models; The Scene; Ambulance Services; Safety and Situational Awareness of EMS Providers; Medical Treatment; Emergency Call Centres; In Hospital EMS; EMS Workforce; Medical Equipment; Triage Systems; Legislation and Finance; Training; and Logistics. The EMS gaps and challenges found mostly increasing demand, reducing response time, diagnosing the urgency of the call, change in the population’s demography and living conditions, crowd management, high rise building due to urbanism, sending first aid instructions, standardization in EMS equipment and legislations, and technology.

Conclusions and Recommendations:

Organization and management structure, staff members, finance and logistic system, ambulance types and technical specifications of medical equipment vary widely among EU countries. The gaps and challenges identified from this study will be a basis of "innovation needs" study. Five workshops planned to make interviews from these findings with all stakeholders.

Keywords: EMS Ecosystem, Gaps and challenges, ambulance, innovation needs,

References:

1. Laurie J. Morrison, Mark P. Angelini, Marian J. Vermeulen, Brian Schwartz Measuring the EMS patient access time interval and the impact of responding to high-rise buildings, Prehospital Emergency Care, 2008;9:1,14-18
2. Bohm K, Kurland L. The accuracy of medical dispatch a systematic review. Scand J Trauma Resusc Emerg Med. 2018;26(1):94.