Review article: Prehospital telehealth for emergency care: A scoping review

Telehealth has been successfully implemented in the prehospital setting to expedite emergency care, although applications are still in their infancy. With recent advances in technologies, it is not described how prehospital telehealth has evolved over the past decade. This scoping review aimed to answer the research question ‘what telehealth platforms have been used to facilitate communication between prehospital healthcare providers and emergency clinicians in the past decade?’. The review was guided by Joanna Briggs Institute scoping review methodology and reported in accordance with the PRISMA checklist for scoping reviews. A systematic search of five databases and Google Scholar was undertaken using key terms ‘prehospital’, ‘ambulance’, ‘emergency care’ and ‘telehealth’, and results were limited to research articles published in English language between 2011 and 2021. Articles were included if they related to the research question and reported quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method or feasibility studies. A total of 28 articles were included in the review that reported feasibility (n = 13), intervention (n = 7) or observational studies (n = 8) involving 20 telehealth platforms. Platforms were commonly implemented to provide prehospital staff with medical support for general emergency care and involved a range of devices that were used to transmit video, audio and biomedical data. The benefits of prehospital telehealth to patients, clinicians and organisations were identified. Challenges to telehealth involved technical, clinical and organisational issues. Few facilitators of prehospital telehealth were identified. Telehealth platforms to facilitate prehospital to ED communication continue to develop but require technological advances and improved network connectivity to support implementation in the prehospital environment.     

Clinical nurse specialists and quality patient care

Clinical nurse specialists (CNSs) deliver expert patient care that is based on advanced nursing models with two important characteristics, clinical judgement and leadership, as summarized by Spross & Baggerly. To utilize the clinical judgement for the benefit of patients, CNSs stay within the realm of direct patient care. The leadership of CNSs is demonstrated by their subroles. When CNSs directly and indirectly provide patient care, the quality of care is improved. This is a result of (i) the important changes of specialization in nursing, (ii) the pivotal role of CNSs in direct patient care, and (iii) the subroles of CNSs that experienced registered nurses (RNs) may not have.     

Vital signs and nurses'' choices of titrated dosages of intravenous morphine for relieving pain following cardiac surgery

Postoperative pain, if unrelieved, will impede patients' recovery. A theoretical model of factors which influence nurses' choices of titrated dosages of intravenous (IV) morphine was constructed for this study. This study aimed to examine whether or not a patient's vital signs would influence nurses' choices of titrated dosages of IV morphine for relieving pain following cardiac surgery. A survey design with a vignette and questionnaire method was used to collect data. The vignette developed by McCaffery & Ferrell was modified and adapted for this study. It described the pain reports and vital signs of two patients on postoperative day 1 following cardiac surgery. Convenience sampling was used to seek voluntary participation from 29 registered nurses working in the cardio-thoracic intensive care unit of a private hospital in Sydney, Australia. A protocol of the unit allowed nurses to titrate IV morphine against the pain of patients following cardiac surgery. The results showed that the pain assessment of the two patients in the vignette documented by the nurses were not consistent. The titrated dosages (a bolus dosage and a maintenance dosage) chosen by the nurses for the patient with slightly elevated vital signs differed significantly from the titrated dosages chosen by the same group of nurses for another patient with vital signs at the lower end of the stable range (t=3. 33, d.f.=25, P < 0.01 for a bolus dosage and t=3.73, d.f.=25, P < 0. 01 for a maintenance dosage). Different risk factors were stated by the nurses in titrating the bolus and maintenance dosages of IV morphine. The importance of accepting patients' verbal reports of pain as well as the provision of optimal dosages of IV morphine for pain relief is highlighted. A disadvantage of using a vignette and questions method is that the patients' clinical status is somewhat unreal. Further studies, however, were also recommended.