Turnover and Patient Care

[JustinEMS]

"The benefit of greater experience operates both through recent and past experiences. This has important implications for retention: retaining the typical paramedic in our sample for an additional quarter is associated with a reduction in out-of-hospital time of approximately 4 minutes. Moreover, 3 years after replacement of an experienced paramedic by a new one, the loss in out-of-hospital time from turnover is between 1 minute and 90 seconds depending on functional form."
Retention, Learning by Doing, and Performance in Emergency Medical Services
Guy David and Tanguy Brachet

I'll just leave that here.

 

[Ewok Jerky]

Context?

Conclusion?

 

[NomadicMedic]

And what's your point? (And if you want us to read a study, post a link)

 

[Carlos Danger]

I'd be interested in seeing the study. But unless it can be shown that reducing out-of-hospital times translates directly to improved outcomes, I don't see how this matters.

In everything we do, it's eventual outcomes that matter. Lots of things we do appear to make the patient better in the short term (i.e. epi increases the HR and BP in a dying patient, intubation in a patient who has suffered a fatal brain injury may improve the Sp02), but if they don't increase the chance of the patient walking out of the hospital intact, those short-term improvements mean little. Off my soapbox now.

Post a link to the study, please. Sounds like a good topic for discussion.

 

[Flying]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2699914/pdf/hesr0044-0902.pdf

Newer paramedics/EMTs will take a little longer to get their **** together in a new environment. Having fewer paramedics will reduce skill dilution, but will burn them out faster. This study mainly uses on-scene and out-of-hospital time as performance metrics.

eh