Literature review of Canadian jurisdictions’ emergency management systems. Summarizes the work from the publications of various Canadian municipalities, regions, and provinces/territories. Most of the research has already been completed.
The first section summarizes the Summary Charts, and looks at which measures have been included in each paper. This section will compare whether each paper provides details about common EMS measures and what information is provided compared to other publications.
Actions: more research is needed on “actions.” Actions, in this case, refer to changes or programs implemented by the jurisdictions to achieve enhanced outcomes. For example, a community paramedics and program by the Toronto paramedic services that involves checking in on high-use* patients to reduce call demand. By checking in on patients regularly and ensuring their vitals are good/treating any issues using nonemergency clinics, did Toronto paramedic services experience a decrease in call demand?
*Patients who frequently call for emergency services.
Another example of an action would be changing to a provincial dispatch system or purchasing additional AEDs. After determining what action has been taken, the actions must be related to trends in medical outcomes as defined in section 2 below.
The 2nd section summarizes the measures in each publication going back 5 years. The data collection for this portion is not complete and there may be some mistakes from the previous writer. The purpose of this section is to identify any trends that may exist in the EMS measures and then relate to actions.
Not every measure in the historical measure summary is important. Focus on measures dealing with times, such as response time, dispatch time, service time etc., and medical outcomes, such as, patient survival, patient mortality, cardiac arrest survival, etc.
These outcomes are then related to actions: Did increasing the number of AEDs decrease cardiac arrest mortality? Was increasing the number of dispatchers effective at reducing response time? Etc.
To summarize: this paper is a literature review of the publications from emergency management services (EMS)/ambulance services from across Canada. The first half of the paper looks at what measures and in how much detail have been included in each publication. The 2nd half of the paper looks at trends in these measures and and whether management actions had an impact on these trends.
