Category Archives: Procedures
Crash cards for in-flight emergency drills
Halfway back from Great Barrier Island and your patient is deteriorating spectacularly? Fortunately, you brought your iPhone…
Download the UK-HEMS ‘Medical Emergencies in Pre-Hospital Care – Crash Cards here.
These contain checklists of elements to consider for a variety of in-flight problems.
(To view these on an iPhone or smartphone you will need a pdf reader, I recommend Goodreader)
Podcast – pre-hospital intubation, and ‘stay and play’ versus ‘scoop and run’
In this podcast, sourced from emcrit.org, Scott Weingart (ED Intensivist from New York City, founder of emcrit.org) and Cliff Reid (Great Sydney Area HEMS, founder of resus.me) discuss pre-hospital intubation and ‘stay and play’ versus ‘scoop and run’ in pre-hospital care.
These are two of the Godfathers of FOAM (free open access meducation).
The podcast is here (right-click if you wish to download), and makes reference to this video clip from London HEMS, which shows a paediatric RSI for TBI with pulmonary contusions and blood in the airway.
“We anaesthetise a child probably once every month. We train for it, but we don’t do very many of them.”
Pre-hospital airway podcast
As much as you may look like a stud pulling up to the Mechanics Bay carpark wearing your flight suit and playing The Backstreet Boys at high volume, the time spent driving to work is much better spent educating yourself than listening to poor-taste music and failing to be hip.
Below is the first in a series of HEMS-relevant podcasts from various sources around the interweb. This podcast comes from prehospitalmed.com, a FOAM (free-open-access-medication website) created by Dr Minh Le Cong, a Queensland RFDS doctor. This site looks like a fantastic educational resource.
The podcast is an interview with Dr Brian Burns, an Emergency Physician and Retrieval Specialist with the Greater Sydney Area HEMS. It is a discussion of two recently-published papers:
The haemodynamic response to pre-hospital RSI in injured patients
Full text pdfs are here (secure area limited to ADHB staff only – ADHB has subscription access for staff to these journals through the Philson Library at the University of Auckland School Of Medicine)
Read the full post, including the key conclusions here
… and be sure kick The Backstreet Boys into touch and play or download (by right-clicking) the podcast here
Go on.
You know being cool is overrated.

