Home › Daily scans › 7 October 2026

Daily scan

Paramedic research, 7 October 2026

9 new paramedic and prehospital papers from the 7 October 2026 scan.

Listen to the 7 October 2026 podcast episode

• Cancer markedly raises OHCA risk

  JACC. Advances · Cohort · Context only

  Swedish matched cohort of ~800,000 cancer patients and 3.7 million controls found cancer carried a 55% higher hazard of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (aHR 1.55), with the greatest short-term excess in lung and neurological cancers.

• Prehospital RSI: what makes it hard

  Health SA = SA Gesondheid · Qualitative · Context only

  Qualitative focus-group study of 39 South African emergency care practitioners found pre-hospital RSI is hampered by system-driven administrative demands, resource and workforce constraints, and communication gaps affecting clinical decision-making.

• On-site CT slashes event transports

  BMC Emergency Medicine · Cohort · Context only

  Retrospective before–after study at the Munich Oktoberfest found an on-site mobile CT led to 429 of 498 imaged patients (86%) being treated and discharged on-site, avoiding an estimated 22,737 minutes of EMS deployment time.

• EMS dashboards: thin crisis evidence

  Archives of Academic Emergency Medicine · Systematic review · Context only

  Scoping review of 26 studies found EMS performance dashboards are used almost exclusively for routine operations — only one study addressed crisis conditions and it used no dashboard.

• R-EDByUS score validated for OHCA prognostication

  Resuscitation · Registry · Hypothesis-generating

  External validation of the R-EDByUS score, which predicts poor neurological outcome after cardiogenic OHCA using prehospital variables alone, in 29,345 patients from the JAAM-OHCA registry — it discriminated well (AUC ~0.91), and among patients with predicted probability ≥99% essentially all had poor outcomes.

• Missed prehospital transfusions in paediatric trauma

  Prehospital Emergency Care · Registry · Hypothesis-generating

  Analysis of 1.66 million US paediatric trauma EMS activations found only 0.1% of children with a positive shock index — those plausibly benefiting from blood — received a prehospital transfusion, suggesting major underuse.

• Poisoning OHCA rising in young Japanese adults

  Resuscitation Plus · Registry · Hypothesis-generating

  In 1.4 million Japanese EMS-treated OHCAs, poisoning-related arrest was rare (0.27%) but its share rose in adults aged 18–29 (adjusted OR 1.027/year) while falling in older groups, with no improvement in neurological outcomes over the decade.

• OHCA outcome variation largest in asystole

  Resuscitation Plus · Registry · Hypothesis-generating

  Across 616,519 Japanese OHCAs, prefecture-level variation in favourable neurological outcome grew with worse initial rhythm — median ORs of 1.19 for shockable, 1.31 for PEA and 1.65 for asystole.

• Rural paediatric interfacility transfers: US picture

  Prehospital Emergency Care · Registry · Context only

  Analysis of 29,992 rural US paediatric interfacility transfers in 2023 found clear age gradients — infants needed specialty critical-care transport most often (32.1%), while teenagers predominated in psychiatric presentations and received more pain and sedation medications.