Sheffield Hallam University
Faculty of Health and Well-Being
Using and Evaluating Evidence to Inform Practice
Assignment: Critical review

Submission Date
14 December 2009
Student Number: 00000000
Student name: nnnn
Word Count
2,130

Introduction

Research is an important part of societal development, the medical and health care professions are no exception to this. The definition of research is to “search again” or “examine carefully” (Burns and Grove 2005). In the ever changing healthcare system, it is essential to continually review procedures to provide the best care possible to patients. Over the past decade, the paramedic profession has evolved to include new training practices, participation in research and education; to increase the level of clinical practice (O’Meara 2009). Prior to this development, the paramedic profession wasn’t encouraged to personally develop; but the Health Professions Council (HPC 2008) now states that all registered paramedics must continually develop their skills and knowledge. Due to this, there has been more research carried out specific to the paramedic profession and in this assignment, I will explore three such pieces; looking at how they each has researched there topic and at the results found.

Background

When an ambulance is despatched to an emergency call, basic details of the job prior to arrival are given; and amongst this information is a brief description of the detail including a “diagnosis”. This information and “diagnosis” is achieved by the use of the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System (AMPDS) which triages patients over the telephone by the use of structured questions (Deakin et al 2005). This system isn’t faultless and as such, many details are different on arrival to the diagnosis made from the call. Therefore, this assignment will critically appraise research into the accuracy of the AMPDS, in accurately diagnosing a medical problem of Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS), because, as Deakin et al (2005) state, in the pre-hospital environment, diagnosis ACS needs to be made at the origin of the telephone call; to give the patient the appropriate resources. This can also be attributed to many medical problems, making the AMPDS a valuable tool; although the system needs to be as accurate as possible.

Search Strategy

To answer my question “Is the AMPDS correctly identifying the correct medical problem?” I searched Sheffield Hallam University Lit Search which is an in-house search engine linked to dedicated databases holding research documents. To find the best database for my search, I chose to look at the evidence-based practice in the health & social care subject; and this gave me a choice of databases. From this list, I chose the CINAHL plus database which is an international database for nursing and allied health professionals, providing an extensive range of 3268 journals. I searched this database using various words and Table 1 shows the search words used and their results:

Table 1: Summary of search strategy

|Database name |Key words/phrases |Database headings used|Search limits- |Number of Results |
| |Used | |(exclusions/ inclusions) | |
| | | | | |
| |Do 999 calls get |“999 calls” | |320559 |
|CINAHL |correct allocation of |AND “correct | | |
| |diagnosis |allocation of | |Too large a number to |
| | |diagnosis” | |examine all, the search |
| |