Emergency Medical Services provide acute care and transportation to hospitals in the event of a medical emergency such as severe injury or illness. An EMS exists to preserve life, prevent additional injury and help recovery. Develop your EMS policies and procedures to cover standard responses to typical situations and to describe search and rescue services.
Purpose
Create detailed EMS policies and procedures to dictate how an incident is assessed and reported, described and handled and how a patient is transported and transferred to hospital care. Procedures cover three levels of service: basic life support, advanced life support and hospital care. Federal and state laws and regulations govern many EMS policies.
Publish your procedures on an Internet site to allow easy access to information. Organize your site into sections on handle quality assurance, certification and accreditation requirements, program administration, additional support services and standards for patient care.
Basic Life Support
Develop your policies and procedures related to BLS to include duties associated with the first responder, typically the person who arrives first on the scene. Policies and procedures typically restrict who can perform care. Ambulance care assistants and emergency medical technicians provide emergency care such as operating defibrillator units (supplying electrical energy to a patient's heart). Depending on the defibrillator unit used, the training required to use the device ranges from very little to extensive. In some locations, EMTs administer drugs and perform other lifesaving activities.
Advanced Life Support
Develop your policies and procedures for ALS to describe the activities paramedics and critical care paramedics perform utilizing additional life support systems based on their additional levels of education and training. Policies and procedures should describe the protocol for such treatments as providing drugs directly into a vein (known as intravenous therapy) and placing a plastic tube in the trachea to enable breathing.
Hospital Care
Document how nurses and physicians conduct emergency services, often in conjunction with other personnel. Develop these policies and procedures to control patient transfer upon being transported to the hospital. Special circumstances govern situations such as natural disasters and government-declared states of emergency. In general, your goal is to attend to the most critically ill (and possible-to-save) first and handle those less endangered when the time allows.
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