Research Proposal for EMS

Emergency Medical Service (EMS)

Division of Emergency Medical Services -- King County, WA

The emergency medical services (EMS) team in King County serves nearly two million people in the local area and states that they provide lifesaving services on average of every three minutes (Public Health - Seattle & King County, 2015). Some of the key data that is included in the 2014 annual report are:

Each year, approximately 1 out of 10 of our residents will use our Medic One/EMS system.

Every year the Medic One/EMS System saves thousands of lives:

In 2013 firefighters responded to more than 172,000 calls in King County.

In 2013, paramedics responded to more than 46,000 calls for advanced life support in King County.

Compared to other cities, cardiac arrest victims are 4 to 5 times more likely to survive.

In 2013, Seattle & King County achieved a 62% survival rate for cardiac arrest. This is currently among the highest reported survival rates.

Furthermore, the annual report published by this EMS department offers a trove of data about the effectiveness and efficiency of the various services that they offer. The EMS division has also implemented a new set of performance metrics.

One idea for a research project would be to analyze the metrics that the EMS has instituted against the best practices that can be found in the literature. There is also data available from the National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) that records national data regarding factors such as EMS response time and prehospital time by emergency medical services. Thus there is the opportunity to compare and contrast different metrics between the King County EMS team and the national averages. One of the initiatives that King County is focusing on is screening calls and coding the response based on the level of emergency. MS agencies often respond rapidly to all patients, often within 8 minutes, and respond with advanced life support (ALS) providers. These requirements remain despite studies questioning the value of such quick responses and studies showing that up to half of all EMS patients do not have emergencies (Shah, 2005). Thus there would also be the opportunity to analyze the effectiveness of this effort as well.