What do community paramedics in Germany do regarding the care of older people? A retrospective, descriptive analysis of low-acuity cases

What do community paramedics in Germany do regarding the care of older people? A retrospective, descriptive analysis of low-acuity cases

Non-life-threatening cases treated by emergency services have been increasing in recent years, especially in older people. In a region in Germany with approximately 600,000 inhabitants, the role of a specially trained community paramedic (Gemeindenotfallsanitäter, G-NFS) was introduced in 2019. The G-NFS is dispatched to low-acuity requests, attends the assignment alone and is allowed to treat patients at home.

Of the 1,643 included anonymous assignment report forms, 52.9% (n = 869) related to patients aged ≥ 65 years. In this population, the mean age was 80.7 years (SD 8.2), 49.6% were female and most were in long-term care, whether as home care recipients (34.8%) or as nursing home residents (26.9%). The most frequent diagnoses were categorised as urological (24.9%), general and unspecified (13.7%), circulatory (13.6%), digestive (12.8%), musculoskeletal (11.5%) and respiratory (10.3%). In 52.7% of the cases no transport was necessary, while 73.7% of urological cases did not need to be transported.

Anna Lena Obst, Insa Seeger & Falk Hoffmann

https://bmcemergmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12873-024-01134-3

BMC Emergency Medicine

16 november 2024

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