Sunday 2 May 2010

Ambos try to tell us something we all sadly know....


Quite a few people in the Northern Rivers have sad or frustrating tales to tell about the Triple 0 emergency line or the state of our ambulance service over the years.
And although many are quite rightly lemony about the attitude of
emergency call centre staff, few blame the ambos for stuff-ups that occur as they genuinely try their best.
Now the paramedics from other states are complaining about a system NSW is currently in the process of installing:
"The current paper-based Patient Care Records contain information from paramedics on a patient's condition and are handed over to doctors and nurses when an ambulance arrives at a hospital.
Through moving them to digital records via the ePCR system paramedics will in theory cut down on the time filling out carbon-copy paper reports and create new lines of digital data which can be analysed to improve healthcare delivery.
However, irate paramedics using the system say records in the ePCR system take up to an hour to fill out, or four-times longer than with pen and paper, and claim it produces lax reports that do not adequately describe a patient's condition. Worse, they say some doctors have been left stranded when overburden paramedics have dumped patients at
hospitals without PCRs.
"It frequently occurs that an [ePCR] is unfinished before we need to attend to a next case. this means [nurses receive] absolutely no record of events and patient's condition and provisional diagnosis until we return sometimes hours later," said one active Tasmanian paramedic on the condition of anonymity. "The paper [PCR] was at least filled in with the important bits and handed over to medical and nursing staff."

Patient death by microchip or apps is only a heartbeat away.

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