J P Labruyère | PubMed Health

PubMed1994

Semi-automatic external defibrillation.

Malignant arrhythmia, which is responsible for most of the out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, is ventricular fibrillation (VF). The best treatment of VF is a controlled electric shock on the chest administered in a short delay. The emergency medical technicians (EMTs) qualified to carry out this treatment in Belgium and in districts often succeed in arriving on the spot 8 minutes earlier than the people of the Service Mobile d'Urgence et de Réanimation (SMUR). The delegation of defibrillation to ambulance crew members however implies a specific teaching, training and a medical control. The Brussels experience shows that semi-automatic external defibrillation by EMT-Ds (SAED) is feasible when criteria for applying SAED in the pre-hospital phase are applicable.

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PubMed1989

[Accessibility of medical services reachable by telephone. The example of the 100 service of Brussels].

The study examines in which degree the belonging to different groups of the population (groups of age, of nationality, socio-economics) influences the interpretability of the help's calls made by telephone to the service 100. The good interpretation of the help's call is evaluated by mean of the decision, good or not, to reinforce the ambulance by a medical team. The analysis considers the phone calls for patients at home. The analysis shows that the accessibility to the service 100 depends on: --the nationality: some groups of nationality don't call the service 100, or not often, because the use of the telephone needs a rather good knowledge of one of the national languages, --the age: the number of calls grows with the age of the victim; the under-evaluation of the state of the victim is significantly more important for older people, --the socio-economic level: the belonging to a low socio-economic group appears as a partial obstacle to verbal communication. The phone calls coming from the poor districts allow a less good evaluation of the state of the victim. To conclude, we may say that: 1. when help's call arrives to the service 100, the operator appreciates the gravity of the situation with a fairly good precision. 2. for people who don't call the service 100 because they don't master enough one of the two national languages, a better accessibility to the service 100 needs a global policy of integration of the strangers (language courses...).

Age Factors↗