Clinical Research in Prehospital Care: Current and Future Challenges

• Published in: Clinics and practice Vol. 13; no. 5; pp. 1266 - 1285
• Main Authors: Cimino, Jonathan, Braun, Claude
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 01.10.2023; MDPI
• Subjects: Airway management; Artificial intelligence; Cardiac arrest; Clinical outcomes; clinical research; Collaboration; Data collection; Emergency medical care; emergency medical services; Emergency services; Hospitals; Illnesses; Infrastructure; Medical personnel; Observational studies; Pain management; Patients; Performance evaluation; prehospital care; research methodology and infrastructure; Review; Telemedicine; Trauma; emergency medical services; research methodology and infrastructure; clinical research; prehospital care
• ISSN: 2039-7283; 2039-7275; 2039-7283
• DOI: 10.3390/clinpract13050114

Prehospital care plays a critical role in improving patient outcomes, particularly in cases of time-sensitive emergencies such as trauma, cardiac failure, stroke, bleeding, breathing difficulties, systemic infections, etc. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in clinical research in prehospital care, and several challenges and opportunities have emerged. There is an urgent need to adapt clinical research methodology to a context of prehospital care. At the same time, there are many barriers in prehospital research due to the complex context, posing unique challenges for research, development, and evaluation. Among these, this review allows the highlighting of limited resources and infrastructure, ethical and regulatory considerations, time constraints, privacy, safety concerns, data collection and analysis, selection of a homogeneous study group, etc. The analysis of the literature also highlights solutions such as strong collaboration between emergency medical services (EMS) and hospital care, use of (mobile) health technologies and artificial intelligence, use of standardized protocols and guidelines, etc. Overall, the purpose of this narrative review is to examine the current state of clinical research in prehospital care and identify gaps in knowledge, including the challenges and opportunities for future research.