By Audrey Fraizer
The first-place awardee in the Academy’s Research Poster contest at NAVIGATOR 2016 includes a research team whose primary investigator is an emergency medical doctor with 54 articles attributed to him.
Dr. Andrea Furgani, who practices emergency medicine at the San Martino University Hospital of Genova, Regional Department of Territorial Medical Emergency 118, Genova, Italy, led the team. He is also Principal Investigator for Italian Society System 118 (SIS 118) – LIFE 118- Verification Italian Territorial cardiac arrest and a consultant for Priority Dispatch Corp. (PDC).
Dr. Furgani’s team looked at “The Impact of MPDS on Response Delay Time and Duration of Emergency Medical Calls,” was set up primarily to evaluate whether the use of the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) reduced the response delay (RD) since its 2011 implementation in the Liguria Region EMCC. There are five EMCCs in the Liguria region, and the study analyzed the 712,798 emergency medical calls received from 2010 to 2015. Evaluating the change in the duration of distress calls after implementation was a secondary objective.
According to the results, implementation of the MPDS significantly reduced the response delay (i.e., time from when the call rings and when emergency medical dispatcher picks up) time in Liguria EMCCs. EMD provided MPDS Pre-Arrival Instructions did increase the time spent with caller, particularly for the more urgent calls (code red: emergency intervention), which was an anticipated result. The full poster will be published in the next issue of the Annals of Emergency Dispatch Research (AEDR).
Dr. Furgani said, “This was the first time we attended NAVIGATOR, and we are very proud of the recognition we received. It is a motivation to keep doing better in the research field.
“We are working on several more projects involving the MPDS,” said Dr. Furgani, who was at NAVIGATOR to accept the award. “I have great expectations for dispatch research. “I have great expectations for dispatch research. It is a field within prehospital medicine that has not been fully explored yet, but it is the first and essential link of the chain of survival. When talking about research, I always like to quote Jim Graham [Deputy Chief of the Chesterfield County (VA) Fire and EMS Department] who wisely said, ‘We must constantly strive to become better at data-driven decision making, instead of following the I think, I feel, or I believe model.”
Twelve posters were submitted and on display at NAVIGATOR 2016, with the winning poster selected by the members of the IAED research department. The award goes to the entire group that conducted the research.
Posters are one of the most common ways of displaying scientific research at conferences, and this year was the third annual Poster Contest sponsored by IAED at U.S. NAVIGATOR. Posters are judged similarly to a research paper, requiring the same elements of good research but contained in a compact space that presents the information visually for its audience.
