Knowledge, attitudes and skills of doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians in pre-hospital care and emergency medicine who accompany patients in ambulances which arrive at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka

Objective: To assess the knowledge, attitudes, and skills in pre-hospital care and emergency medicine of doctors, nurses and Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT), who accompanied emergency patients in ambulances? Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among the doctors, nurses, and EMT who accompanied emergency patients in ambulances to the National Hospital. All ambulances arriving from August to October 2008 (n=409) were screened. A self-administered questionnaire with 30 items was used to assess knowledge, attitudes, and skills. The knowledge was categorized into three levels, EMT-basic level, EMT-intermediate level, and EMT-paramedic level and the scores were converted into the percentages. Results: The overall knowledge score on basic, intermediate and paramedic level were 57.5%, 42.9%, and 33.9% respectively. The knowledge on airway management (84.3%), bleeding control (82.9%), patient transport (71%) and fi rst aids (61%) at the EMT-basic level were higher, however oxygen administration (37.1%) and basic life support (38.6%), spinal immobilization (45.7%), traction splinting (47%) and triage (48.6%) were lower. For the EMT-intermediate level, knowledge on endotracheal intubation (41.4%) and initial cardiac drug therapy (44.3%) were low. For the EMT-paramedic level, the knowledge on the advanced respiratory support (53%), ECG interpretation (37%), pharmacology (13%) and paediatric life support (20%) were lower. Most staff showed positive attitudes towards the need of basic knowledge in pre-hospital care (97.1%, n=34), need for proper training (97.1%, n=34) and cost for pre-hospital care (77.1%, n=27), while they showed relatively negative attitudes towards the outcome of pre-hospital care (74.3%, n=26). For the required skills for advanced life support, most of the staff showed skills in IV cannulation (71.4%, n=25) and IV drug administration (71.4%, n=25) however less skills were shown cricothyroidotomy (22.9%, n=8), pleural drainage (25.7%, n=9) and laryngoscopy and intubation (31.4%, n=11). Conclusion: The knowledge at the EMT-basic level was average and intermediate and paramedic levels were lower than average. The attitudes were generally positive. However they lacked some specifi c skills. Research Article Knowledge, attitudes and skills of doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians in pre-hospital care and emergency medicine who accompany patients in ambulances which arrive at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka Gangadevi Nandasena1 and Chrishantha Abeysena2* 1Medical Offi cer of Health, Ministry of Health, Sri Lanka 2Professor, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka *Address for Correspondence: Chrishantha Abeysena, Professor, Department of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, Tel: 0094777591715; Email: chrishanthaabeysena@yahoo.com; chrishantha-abeysena@kln.ac. lk Submitted: 19 November 2018 Approved: 18 December 2018 Published: 19 December 2018 Copyright: © 2018 Abeysena C, et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited