Operation of a support service team in the emergency department of a general hospital.

We describe the development and operation of an emergency support service team in the Emergency Department of the Kingston General Hospital, Kingston, Ont. The team, composed of professionals from other departments of the hospital, provides emotional and practical support to family members or survivors in medical emergencies. We discuss the roles of the team members and their procedures for dealing with distress and grief.     

Importance of patient selection in evaluating a cardiac ambulance service.

All patients brought to hospital by a special cardiac ambulance were followed up and compared with patients carried by routine ambulances to assess the effectiveness of a cardiac ambulance service. The overall mortality of patients with heart attacks was 51% among those carried by an ordinary ambulance and 40% among those carried by the cardiac ambulance. The apparently low mortality in the latter group was balanced, however, by a high mortality (68%) among patients carried by ordinary ambulances when the cardiac ambulance was available but not used; these patients tended to have a short duration of symptoms and heart attacks away from home, and their ambulance was more often called by a member of the public than a general practitioner. It seems therefore that low-risk cases were inadvertently selected for transport by the cardiac ambulance; such unintentional selection makes it difficult to evaluate a cardiac ambulance service.