This document is the result of a project whose aim was to describe and assess emergency medical services (EMS) systems across the European Union (EU) and their links with national crisis management systems.

This artcle comments on the role of Situational Awareness in EMS

This report presents information on the results of EED Project which was designed to identify common indicators for European EMS systems and evaluate their suitability for integration into a comprehensive public health monitoring strategy for the European Union (EU).

This document summarises the findings derived from a research carried out as an overview of logistical problems arising for EMS providers, demonstrating how some of these problems are related and intertwined.

This document summarises the most important information compiled through the FAQ section of the EU commission.

This publication was developed with funding from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
(NHTSA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DTNH22-11-C-00223). The opinions, findings, and
conclusions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of NHTSA or
DOT. The United States Government assumes no liability for its content or use thereof. If trade or
manufacturers' names or products are mentioned, it is because they are considered essential to the
object of the publication and should not be construed as an endorsement. The United States
Government does not endorse products or manufacturers.

Planning for a potential emerging infectious disease pandemic, like COVID-19, is critical to protecting the health and welfare of our
nation. To assist state, local, tribal, and territorial partners in their planning efforts, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response has developed the following checklist. It identifies specific
activities your jurisdiction can do now to prepare for, respond to, and be resilient in the face of COVID-19. Many of the activities in this
checklist are specific for COVID-19, however many, pertain to any public health emergency.

Emergency care is basically concerned with the provision of pre-hospital and in-hospital medical and/or paramedical services and it typically involves a wide variety of interdependent and distributed activities that can be interconnected to form emergency care processes within and between Emergency Medical Service (EMS) agencies and hospitals. Hence, in developing an information system for emergency care processes, it is essential to support individual process activities and to satisfy collaboration and coordination needs by providing readily access to patient and operational information regardless of location and time. Filling this information gap by enabling the provision of the right information, to the right people, at the right time fosters new challenges, including the specification of a common information format, the interoperability among heterogeneous institutional information systems or the development of new, ubiquitous trans-institutional systems. This paper is concerned with the development of an integrated computer support to emergency care processes by evolving and cross-linking institutional healthcare systems. To this end, an integrated EMS cloud-based architecture has been developed that allows authorized users to access emergency case information in standardized document form, as proposed by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile, uses the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) standard Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Hospital Availability Exchange (HAVE) for exchanging operational data with hospitals and incorporates an intelligent module that supports triaging and selecting the most appropriate ambulances and hospitals for each case.

Today’s global EMS has advanced so much that it contributes
widely to the overall function of health care systems. The World
Health Organization regards EMS systems as an integral part of
any effective and functional health care system. It is the first point
of contact for the majority of people to health care services during
emergencies and life-threatening injuries and act as a gate-keeping
step for accessing secondary and tertiary services. Emergency
medical providers around the world have developed an extended
role to deal with medical and trauma emergencies utilizing
advanced clinical technology.

REMSA’s Community Health Programs effectively targeted people living in underserved communities, which had the highest utilization rates for the Nurse Health Line and Alternative Destination Transports. These alternative pathways were also very popular with the people who used them. Patients who called the Nurse Health Line and those enrolled in the Community Paramedicine Program consistently reported high levels of satisfaction in follow-up surveys.