It was a time of social upheaval and racial discontent. Those in poorer areas didn’t have good access to medical care certainly less than others elsewhere who were wealthier (and typically whiter). Neither did they have the same career opportunities.
In Pittsburgh in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Freedom House Ambulance Service presented a pioneering answer to both problems, training residents of the city’s underserved areas as paramedics to deliver elite prehospital care back to neglected neighborhoods like their own. And while it lasted less than a decade, it demonstrated that with the right resources and will, pipelines could be built to craft worthy candidates in need of a chance into dedicated caregivers that returned quality help to their communities.
Authors: Chu J, Leung KHB, Snobelen P, Nevils G, Drennan IR, Cheskes S, Chan TCY
Published in:
Resuscitation, 2021 Feb 22; 162: 120–7
In this month’s Journal Watch we review a fascinating study that utilized machine learning to develop and evaluate dispatch rules for drone-delivered AEDs. Welcome to the future!
As you might suspect, having drones deliver AEDs directly to scenes could be a great way to decrease time to first shock. In fact, recent studies have shown using drones in this way is feasible. However, dispatch policies for AED-carrying drones have not been well studied. Understanding which drones are available, where they are at any given time, and successfully delivering an AED to the scene of a cardiac arrest before the ambulance arrives requires a lot of coordination.