Blood Products in the Field & Disaster Medical Management

Disaster Podcast host Jamie Davis, the Podmedic and his co-host Sam Bradley are back from their trip to EMS World Expo 2015 in Las Vegas. They chat with Dr. Joe Holley from Paragon Medical Education Group about the use of blood products in the field. Many EMS systems worldwide are looking at ways to get blood products to multisystem trauma patients on the scene if the injury to prevent death from catastrophic blood loss.

Most of the systems using blood products in the field for medical care are doing so in Aeromedical transport situations. This makes sense because these units are often dispatched from the hospital where they can manage and rotate blood supplies to not waste this precious resource. Blood needs to be kept in tightly controlled temperature situations and must be rotated frequently with fresh blood supplies as the packaged blood ages.

The final topic of the discussion with Dr. Joe is a look at an article on a cardiac care cocktail to treat cardiac patients and potentially save lives. Joe points out that the research in the article is older and that current best practices point to other treatments to manage cardiac patients than to use the insulin/potassium cocktail.

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Again, a special thank-you to Paragon Medical Education Group for their continued support of this podcast as our partners in this endeavor to bring disaster medicine to you. Check out their page and educational resources that can help your system be more prepared for what happens in your area.

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