Abstract
Emergency services worldwide face increasing cost pressure that potentially limits their existing resources. In many countries, emergency services also face the issues of staff shortage–creating extra challenges and constraints, especially during crisis times such as the COVID-19 pandemic–as well as long distances to sparsely populated areas resulting in longer response times. To overcome these issues and potentially reduce consequences of daily (medical) emergencies, several countries, such as Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, have started initiatives using new types of human resources as well as equipment, which have not been part of the existing emergency systems before. These resources are employed in response to medical emergency cases if they can arrive earlier than emergency medical services (EMS). A good number of studies have investigated the use of these new types of resources in EMS systems, from medical, technical, and logistical perspectives as their study domains. Several review papers in the literature exist that focus on one or several of these new types of resources. However, to the best of our knowledge, no review paper that comprehensively considers all new types of resources in emergency medical response systems exists. We try to fill this gap by presenting a broad literature review of the studies focused on the different new types of resources, which are used prior to the arrival of EMS. Our objective is to present an application-based and methodological overview of these papers, to provide insights to this important field and to bring it to the attention of researchers as well as emergency managers and administrators.
Highlights
Or everyday emergencies are frequent events with low magnitude of consequences (Quarantelli 1995)
We focus on pre-emergency medical services (EMS) services and distinguish two main categories for them, (1) human resources and (2) equipment (i.e., Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and drones)
We found that simulation is used as a primary method only in three papers, one paper related to volunteers, one related to drones, and one to AEDs, and as a complementary method for two papers related to AEDs and drones
Summary
Or everyday emergencies are frequent events with low magnitude of consequences (Quarantelli 1995). The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated staff shortage and shown the importance of using all available resources as efficiently as possible This means that adequate response times for all patients, 24 / 7, and throughout all regions during both normal and crisis times are difficult or even impossible to ensure. To overcome the issues faced by the EMS and potentially reduce consequences of daily medical emergencies, several countries, including Sweden, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands, have started initiatives utilizing new types of resources, human resources as well as equipment. Others utilize automated external defibrillators (AEDs) that are located in public buildings or drones that can bring necessary resources to an emergency scene These human resources and equipment form services that we call “pre-EMS services” in this study, because their utilization prior to the arrival of EMS can potentially contribute to saving lives of patients. Even though the research field on pre-EMS services is relatively new, a good number of works exists that have studied the use of these new types of resources in medical emergency systems, from different perspectives including medical, technical, and logistical
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