Home › Daily scans › 24 October 2026

Daily scan

Paramedic research, 24 October 2026

7 new paramedic and prehospital papers from the 24 October 2026 scan.

Listen to the 24 October 2026 podcast episode

• Who doesn't call an ambulance for chest pain

  Open Access Emergency Medicine · Systematic review · Hypothesis-generating

  Systematic review of 14 Australian studies testing whether equity-related factors affect EMS use for acute coronary syndrome — EMS use ranged 36–79%, with under-49s up to 68% lower odds of calling than over-65s, men 11% lower than women, overseas-born 15% lower, non-English speakers 6–20% lower and remote residents 25% lower than city dwellers.

• Prehospital ultrasound as a decision tool

  The Ultrasound Journal · Other · Context only

  Structured narrative review of 38 articles on prehospital POCUS across cardiac arrest, shock, dyspnoea, trauma, paediatric and obstetric uses — it can identify reversible causes in arrest, characterise shock and support trauma triage and destination decisions, but limited sensitivity means it can't rule anything out.

• How Utah widened paramedic oxytocin scope

  Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health · Other · Context only

  Quality improvement initiative describing how a rural US state changed its EMS protocols in April 2024 to let paramedics give oxytocin to prevent postpartum haemorrhage and AEMTs give it intramuscularly for prevention and treatment.

• HEMS vs road: guideline adherence in trauma

  European Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery · Registry · Context only

  Retrospective analysis of 129,783 severely injured patients in the German TraumaRegister DGU (physician-staffed helicopter and ground services) found HEMS patients, who were younger and more severely injured, had higher rates of guideline-recommended prehospital interventions, such as advanced airway in impaired consciousness (96.5% vs 82.9%) and prehospital chest drains (14.0% vs 5.5%).

• Paramedics on digital decision support

  BMC Emergency Medicine · Qualitative · Context only

  Qualitative interview study of 12 Norwegian paramedics on digital health tools for prehospital non-emergency decision-making — four themes emerged around call assessment and resource allocation, shared situational awareness, interprofessional communication, and the challenges of patchy implementation.

• Cluster trials read differently to individual ones

  Critical Care Medicine · Systematic review · Context only

  Meta-epidemiological study of 65 meta-analyses (212 trials, 315,276 patients) comparing cluster-randomised with individually randomised trials in prehospital, emergency and critical care — no difference in mortality effect estimates, but cluster trials reported significantly smaller effect sizes for length-of-stay-type outcomes.

• Hot days drive dizziness call-outs

  Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine · Cohort · Context only

  Population-based study of 270,120 emergency transports in Kochi, Japan linking weather to dizziness-related ambulance call-outs — hotter days and short-term temperature spikes raised the odds of high-volume dizziness days, peaking in summer.