Prehospital airway management: the patient needs oxygen!

Excerpt

The current guidelines of the European Resuscitation Council (ERC) for advanced cardiac life support recommend that endotracheal intubation "should be attempted only if the healthcare provider is properly trained and has adequate ongoing experience with the technique." [1] One would consider anaesthesiologists to be among those who should be able to fulfill these recommendations quite easily. Interestingly, Sollid and colleagues [2] found that anaesthesia specialists and trainees who were working as helicopter emergency medical services (HEMS) physicians felt that they did not perform a sufficient number of annual intubations to maintain this important skill. An evaluation of one rural and two urban ambulance bases showed that the emergency physicians responding to prehospital calls performed one intubation every 2 to 7 months, depending on the case load of the ambulance base and the number of shifts worked by the individual physicians [3]. Therefore, I wholeheartedly agree with the conclusions reached by Sollid and colleagues that prehospital emergency physicians require improved training methods and systems to perform airway management under adverse conditions with a high probability of success. …