Emergency Medical Services

Abstract

Emergency medical services. Prehospital care. The act of providing care to the sick and injured prior to their arrival at a healthcare facility is as old as medicine itself. What’s changed over the decades is the formalization of the process and the establishment of highly trained technical experts specializing in providing short-term advanced care and transportation. Using a range of medical providers ranging from physicians to individuals trained in basic first aid, these systems have become an integral part of the modern healthcare system by bringing a predictable level of care to the field and delivering a patient with at least some level of assessment and immediate interventions already performed to a medical center. While the level of care and sophistication of these systems tend to be more advanced in first-world countries, the communities in developing countries provide what they can with available resources. It has always been the natural tendency of humans to help each other in times of need. So, while we have created a community expectation of professional prehospital care in the industrialized world, one cannot underestimate or overlook the efforts in the most remote and primitive places. If a healthcare system exists, a method to help and transport the ill and injured will have almost always evolved.