Patient Safety in Emergency Medical Services: A Systematic Review of the Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Preventable harm from medical care has been extensively documented in the inpatient setting. Emergency medical services (EMS) providers care for patients in dynamic and challenging environments; prehospital emergency care is a field that represents an area of high risk for errors and harm, but has received relatively little attention in the patient safety literature. OBJECTIVE: To identify the threats to patient safety unique to the EMS environment and interventions that mitigate those threats, we completed a systematic review of the literature. METHODS: We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) for combinations of key EMS and patient safety terms composed by a pan-canadian expert panel using a year limit of 1999 to 2011. We excluded commentaries, opinions, letters, abstracts, and non-english publications. Two investigators performed an independent hierarchical screening of titles, abstracts, and full-text articles blinded to source. We used the kappa statistic to examine interrater agreement. Any differences were resolved by consensus. RESULTS: We retrieved 5,959 titles, and 88 publications met the inclusion criteria and were categorized into seven themes: adverse events and medication errors (22 articles), clinical judgment (13), communication (6), ground vehicle safety (9), aircraft safety (6), interfacility transport (16), and intubation (16). Two articles were randomized controlled trials; the remainder were systematic reviews, prospective observational studies, retrospective database/chart reviews, qualitative interviews, or surveys. The kappa statistics for titles, abstracts, and full-text articles were 0.65, 0.79, and 0.87, respectively, for the first search and 0.60, 0.74, and 0.85 for the second. CONCLUSIONS: We found a paucity of scientific literature exploring patient safety in EMS. Research is needed to improve our understanding of problem magnitude and threats to patient safety and to guide interventions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.086 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.021 | 0.022 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".