By EMS1 Staff
ST. CLOUD, Minn. — The EMS Voluntary Event Notification Tool (EVENT) issued their 2017 near-miss report and highlighted that violence against paramedics is the fastest growing issue, with 52 incidents reported last year.
EVENT collects anonymous data from EMS providers to develop ways to improve EMS safety.
The reports recently issued covered these three areas: patient safety, paramedic near-miss and violence against paramedics, with violence being the most reported issue of 2017.
EVENT highlighted several main findings from the violence against paramedics report:
- Paramedics are most often attacked in the ambulance, and next most often in a residence.
- The paramedic victims are largely white, young and male. The assailants are largely of varying races, young and fairly equally divided between males and females.
- Paramedics are mostly pushed, shoved and grabbed, but are also choked or assaulted by use of a club, knife or firearm. Most of the time the paramedic does not file an incident report with their agency.
- Law enforcement is often notified, but arrests are not usually made.
According to the report on patient safety, the top three incident types of the 40 submitted throughout the year were medication, procedural/operations and human error.
There were 14 near-miss events reported in 2017, with human error accounting for six and situational awareness accounting for five.
You can view the reports below.
Cy2017 Event Patient Safety Summary