Suchergebnisse

Purpose
With the increasing demand on ambulance services, paramedics are tasked to arrange as much out of hospital care as possible, to develop integrated systems of care and work with hundreds of different providers – all in the 15 minutes allocated for assessment. A UK ambulance trust is navigating and leading much of this work as one of the first trusts to implement a general practitioner referral policy as an alternate to direct conveyance. The paper aims to discuss this issue.


Design/methodology/approach
Here the authors discuss the referral scheme, examine the limited evidence available and discuss what is needed to influence prospective success of implementing this scheme in other trusts.


Findings
Limited evidence for these schemes are described, however there is a clear gap in critical appraisal and methodologically rigorous evidence needed to implement these schemes in other ambulance schemes.


Originality/value
In order to facilitate collaboration of healthcare services and to minimize the burden of increasing numbers of patients, communication and discussion of alternate routes of care is crucial. This viewpoint piece is one of the first to emphasize the potential benefits of such schemes.

AbstractThe issue of microplastic pollution has seen an increasing focus over the last decade, both as a scientific research topic and due to intensive media interest. Despite this, there has been, until recently, a relative paucity of data relating to the volume and type of microplastics in the marine environment. The Cell 1 Regional Coastal Monitoring Programme, which covers approximately 300 km of the northeast England coastline, has recently collected subtidal sediment samples from the bed of the North Sea and analysed these for particle size distribution and microplastic content. This paper presents the results of this analysis along with a literature review of the sources, movements and concentration of microplastics in the marine environment.

Part 2: Information Systems, Information Modelling and Semantics ; International audience ; The Emergency Response Intelligence Capability (ERIC) tool, http://eric.csiro.au, automatically gathers data about emergency events from authoritative web sources, harmonises the information content and presents it on an interactive map. All data is recorded in a database which allows the changing status of emergency events to be identified and provides an archive for historical review.ERIC was developed for the Australian Government Department of Human Services Emergency Management team who is responsible for intelligence gathering and situation reporting during emergency events. Event information is combined with demographic data to profile the affected community. Identifying relevant community attributes, such as languages spoken or socioeconomic information, allows the department to tailor its response appropriately to better support the impacted community.An overview of ERIC is presented, including its use by the department and the difficulties overcome in establishing and maintaining a nationally consistent harmonised model of emergency event information. Preliminary results of republishing the emergency event information using the Australian Profile of the Common Alerting Protocol, an XML standard to facilitate the construction and exchange of emergency alert and warning messages, are also presented.