Mini-reviewAdvanced life support versus basic life support in the pre-hospital setting: A meta-analysis☆
Section snippets
Background
The impetus for the development of modern pre-hospital emergency medicine has come from a variety of concerns. Among the major forces has been the realization that traumatic injuries have often been neglected and that modern management of their care has been much better for wartime combatants than for civilians. Second, has been the recognition that cardiac arrest is capable of resuscitation, and need not be an automatic death sentence. Third has been the development of the specialty of
Materials & methods
The present review is based on a protocol which was peer reviewed by the Scientific Committee of the post-graduate program of Health Crisis Management of the University of Athens Medical School.
Study characteristics
Detailed results of the literature research are presented in Fig. 1. We initially identified 1081 potentially eligible citations by searching Medline (through PubMed, n = 276), EMBASE (n = 66), Cochrane Library (n = 376) and Scopus (n = 363). Two authors screened titles and abstracts for potential eligibility and 968 articles were excluded (689 articles were duplicated in the 4 different databases, 212 articles reported results of non comparative studies, 53 articles had other endpoints than survival
Discussion
In this systematic review, we have summarized the available evidence from controlled trials that compared ALS to BLS care in trauma and not trauma (cardiac arrest) patient survival to the pre-hospital setting. Information on the methodological quality was incomplete in a number of small-sized trials. In our study, trials that adequately reported methodological quality items were large trials, and dominate the pooled estimates of effect. Therefore, it is unlikely that pooled estimates are
Conclusions
Implementation of ALS care to non-traumatic cardiac arrest patients can increase survival and further research is unlikely to change our confidence in the estimate of the effect. On the contrary, in regards trauma patients, our meta-analysis and review produced non-significant results. There is necessity for further research which should concentrate on the evaluation of trauma systems, taking into consideration, the type of the trauma, the trauma severity as well as the pre-hospital setting
Limitations
There are a number of limitations in the study. Only few controlled studies of sufficient quality and strength examining survival in trauma were published and the majority of the data produced from controlled before-and-after trials and other controlled trials, which were not truly randomized but the treatment allocations were made using other pseudo- or quasi-random processes. Differences in patient (both cardiac arrest and trauma) between ALS versus BLS populations may have confounded the
Conflict of interest statement
No conflicts of interest to declare.
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2022, Journal of Surgical ResearchCitation Excerpt :Skills involve cleaning wounds, stopping hemorrhage with direct pressure, and immobilizing fractures or the cervical spine in suspected traumatic spinal cord injuries. Basic interventions have been found to be as important in reducing mortality as advanced measures, as a meta-analysis of 18 studies found no difference in survival for trauma patients receiving advanced-life-support versus basic-life-support, though rapid emergent transport to definitive care (“scoop and run” philosophy) is likely to limit the impact of advanced prehospital measures.17 Cost data collected from five LFR programs that were launched between 2008 and 2019, including three from our group in sub-Saharan Africa, was compiled in Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, United States of America).
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A Spanish translated version of the abstract of this article appears as Appendix in the final online version at doi:10.1016/j.resuscitation.2011.04.006.