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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Disaster Emerg. Med.
Sec. Emergency Health Services
Volume 2 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/femer.2024.1440545

Prehospital Point of Care Ultrasound in Helicopter Emergency Medical Services: a five-year experience study in Belgium

Provisionally accepted
Romain Betz Romain Betz 1,2*Allison Gilbert Allison Gilbert 1Didier Moens Didier Moens 1,2Laurent Marissiaux Laurent Marissiaux 1,2Méryl Paquay Méryl Paquay 1Raphaëlle Lopez Iglesias Raphaëlle Lopez Iglesias 1Olivier Pirotte² Olivier Pirotte² 2Alexandre Ghuysen Alexandre Ghuysen 1Samuel Stipulante Samuel Stipulante 1,2
  • 1 University Hospital of Liège, Liège, Belgium
  • 2 Centre médical héliporté (CMH), Bra-sur-Lienne, Belgium, Lierneux, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The utilization of Clinical Ultrasound (CUS) in Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) has become increasingly prevalent, reflecting its significant role in emergency care.. This descriptive, monocentric study, conducted at the Helicopter Medical Center (CMH) of Bra-sur-Lienne, Belgium, aimed to describe the use of CUS within HEMS and evaluate its potential impact on diagnostic accuracy, therapeutic interventions, and hospital destination decisions. Over a five-year period, from January 2018 to December 2022, our retrospective analysis included 6126 HEMS interventions, with CUS performed in 29.55% of cases. The study demonstrated that CUS led to therapeutic changes in 30.88% of instances and affected the hospital destination in 9% of cases, despite a potential bias towards directing patients to the University Hospital Center of Liège (CHU of Liège) due to operational constraints. The agreement between prehospital CUS findings and hospital imaging was substantial, with an 80.39% concordance rate, underscoring CUS's utility in enhancing prehospital diagnostic accuracy. We found no significant increase in on-scene time due to CUS usage, with most exams completed in less than five minutes.Our findings highlight the interesting role of CUS in HEMS, facilitating more informed and confident medical decision-making in prehospital emergency care. However, variability in CUS application emphasize the need for standardized guidelines to optimize its use. The study's limitations include its retrospective, monocentric design and the focus on on-scene ultrasound evaluations. Future research should aim at a more extensive, prospective analysis to further validate the benefits of CUS in emergency medical services.

    Keywords: Clinical ultrasound, Prehospital medicine, ultrasound, Emergency Medicine, Helicopter Medical Services

    Received: 29 May 2024; Accepted: 29 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Betz, Gilbert, Moens, Marissiaux, Paquay, Lopez Iglesias, Pirotte², Ghuysen and Stipulante. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Romain Betz, University Hospital of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.