We transported a 94 YOF the other day with a c/c of "uncontrollable shaking". As expected we did a stroke assessment. The medic was giving the radio report to the ED. It was all very generic except that he accidentally said "Boston Stroke Scale indications are all positive" rather than "all negative". The ED acknowledged and did not question. I mentioned it to him right away and he said "oh crap" but didn't correct via radio.
We arrived about 2 minutes later and I was very surprised that we weren't met at the door with "Is this the stroke patient?"
Basically it made me wonder what the ED really hears and cares about.
It depends...
Do you work in an area saturated by the most minimally trained? Is the volume of patients the ED sees very high? Who is answering the phone?
If the majority of local EMS providers are not very good compared to the standards of the medical/nursing community, not a public safety perspective, said providers might not give any weight to your report. All they care about is how long before you come.
Some high volume EDs want only to know if the pt is seriously ill or not.
What EMS thinks is important, what a nurse thinks is important, and what a physician thinks is important can be very different things.
I have a great story about calling a hospital where a nurse picked up the phone, I gave report to include an unstable pelvis, flail chest and a needle decompression for a pneumo on a patient who fell 3 stories before landing chest first on a guardrail. When I arrived the place was normal as can be and when I asked where the trauma team was a nurse looked at me quizically and said "If you wanted a trauma team why didn't you say this patient was a trauma alert?"
One hospital it is a helo dispatch center that picks up the phone and if you need orders they page a physician. They have a whole form of questions from vital signs to history, and after you answer it all, they send a one sentence page to the charge nurse that looks something like:
69 y/o male difficulty breathing ETA 5 minutes. (which by the time you finish answering all the questions you are in the parking lot because the transport times are short and the nurse gets the page 30 seconds after you arrive)
Sometimes medics don't even know when they are looking at an emergent patient because the pathology wasn't covered in medic school.
In all systems I have ever heard of when you get to the ED they take vitals an assess the patient. At that point maybe you could add an important finding or possible trend, but absent that, nothing that can't be read from your report. (Which is usually not read anyway unless spot checked or red flagged for your medical director.)
I especially like flags for narcotics usage. Particularly with pain management protocol like "2mg morphine every 10 minutes to a maximum of 10 mg." Might as well tell them to "man up and take the pain." (but that is another thread)
long and short, the chances anyone cares past patient age, chief complaint, and an important catch phrase like "trauma alert, stroke patient, or STEMI" is very remote in my experience.
