Emergency responders work faster to save patient’s lives
Emergency responders are working faster than ever to save patient’s lives.
For decades, those in the medical field referred to the ‘Golden Hour’ a term attributed to R. Adams Cowley, with the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore. During his experience, Cowley said if a trauma patient could get care or surgery within 60 minutes, the likelihood of survival was highest.
Over the years however, the concept ‘Platinum Ten Minutes’ has appeared to have taken over. According to the Journal of Lancaster General Health in Pennsylvania, it’s the companion to the ‘Golden Hour’ but “is based on the concept that seriously injured patients should have no more than 10 minutes of scene-time stabilization by emergency medical personnel prior to transport to definitive care at a trauma center.”
The ‘Platinum Ten Minutes’ is the same approach used by emergency responders and trauma centers in El Paso.
The El Paso Fire Department recently arranged a meeting between the trauma team at Del Sol Medical Center and two emergency responders who helped save the life of a former patient who suffered a life-threatening motorcycle crash in July.
In a Facebook post, the El Paso Fire Department posted: “It is rare for firefighters to know the outcome of their patients once they transfer care to a hospital. It is even rarer for them to actually meet them after they are discharged from the hospital. But on Nov. 11, that’s exactly what happened when FST Donald Quinn and FF Paulino Simental got to meet Mahlon Miller .”
Dr. Stephen Flaherty, Trauma Medical Director at Del Sol, credited Miller’s survival to the actions of emergency responders.
Dr. Flaherty is quoted by the El Paso Fire Department saying, “Trauma can only be taken care of by a system of agencies, and that starts in the field with our first responders. We used to talk about the ‘golden hour.’ Now we are talking more about something called the ‘platinum 10 minutes.’ When something like this happens, were all of the sudden the patient can’t breathe, you don’t have an hour to fix that problem. There has to be someone with the patient with the knowledge, the training and the skills to intervene.”
