Dr. Bona is a second-year emergency medicine resident at Maimonides Medical Center.
Dr. Friedman is a board-certified EMS and emergency physician. He is the associate medical director of prehospital care at Maimonides Medical Center and the lead house physician at Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and the US Open. Dr. Friedman is the academic co-director of the Mass Gathering Medicine Summit. He serves as the medical director for numerous annual mass gatherings.
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3 Responses to “Ambulance Lights and Sirens Should Only Be Used When the Benefit Outweighs the Risks”
April 8, 2018
John SmartAnother unsaid (unknown) variable is the push to keep units available. Thus the perceived need to run L&S for everything to hasten turnaround times.
April 9, 2018
Jacob“Furthermore, a 2014 study determined the number needed to treat with L&S to prevent one patient’s death is 5,000.”
You may want to re-examine that figure. The study the NHTSA paper cites for that only looked at calls the EMD system in Denmark had triaged as non-emergent that ended with a same-day death, and whether dispatching them as a higher priority would have made a difference in outcome. It did not look at calls dispatched for a L&S response, and it did not account for transport priority.
They found that of the 94,488 non-emergent dispatches in the review period, there were 152 same-day deaths, and 18 of those were potentially preventable. That’s where they got the NNT=5000 from.
Interestingly, they found that 13 of those 18 involved incorrect use of the dispatch protocols.
The original study is “Preventable deaths following emergency medical dispatch – an audit study”, Andersen, et al (2014), and can be found here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4293002/
April 9, 2018
Kipp KretschmanLights and sirens are OK ,,,not going thru red lights is even better.. Stop look and proceed when safe