Raising Awareness of Hearing and Communication Disorders Among Emergency Medical Services Students: Are Knowledge Translation Workshops Useful?

Abstract

Objective: In numerous countries, emergency medical services (EMS) students receive curriculum training in effective patient–provider communication, but most of this training assumes patients have intact communication capabilities, leading to a lack of preparedness to interact with patients, who have communication disorders. In such cases, first responders could end up delivering suboptimal care or possibly wrong procedures that could harm the disabled person. Method: A quasi-experimental design (pretest–posttest) was used to assess the knowledge of EMS students both before and after a translation workshop on how to deal with patients who have hearing and communication disorders during emergencies. Comparisons between pretest and posttest scores were examined using the Wilcoxon signed rank test. The level of knowledge scores was compared before and after the workshop. Results: The results indicated that EMS students’ scores improved after the workshop. There was a 0.763 increase in the average score of knowledge level. The results of this study show that knowledge translation workshops are a useful intervention to enhance the level of knowledge among EMS students when interacting with hearing and communication patients. Conclusions: Our results show that such training workshops lead to better performance. Communication is a vital element in a medical encounter between health care providers and patients at all levels of health care but specifically in the prehospital arena. Insufficient or lack of communication with a vulnerable population, who may suffer from various disabilities, has a significant impact on the outcome of treatment or emergency management.

Assessing Thai Hospitals’ Evacuation Preparedness Using the Flexible Surge Capacity Concept and Its Collaborative Tool

“…Irrespective of definitions, evacuation inherently increases the risks for patients, staff, and other people nearby when transferred due to a variety of internal and external factors that may impact them (Tekin et al 2017 ). Moreover, hospitals serve a large number of people who require special assistance, such as those with physical impairments or hearing and vision difficulties, which complicates the evacuation process (Al-Wathinani et al 2022 ). Within this complex process, there is a need for critical decision making in several levels of action and care.…”

“…In both events, the need for partial or total hospital evacuation in affected areas was eminent. However, there has been no evident improvement in producing guidelines or educational initiatives (Khorram-Manesh, Dulebenets, et al 2021 ; Al-Wathinani et al 2022 ). The FSC concept may, however, facilitate the evacuation processes and exercise initiatives to enhance the multiagency and multi-professional synchronization and collaboration needed in such an event (Phattharapornjaroen et al 2022a ).…”

Hospitals’ Evacuation Preparedness; A Survey Among 42 Thai Hospitals According to the Flexible Surge Capacity Concept.

“…Such a process is insecure for patients, staff, and other people nearby due to many internal and external factors that may impact them when transferred to safer zones 12 . Especially when some of the hospitals' occupants are vulnerable, i.e., people who may require additional assistance with evacuation due to physical limitations and hearing and vision insu ciencies 13 . In addition, both manmade and nature-caused incidents may impact the infrastructure in the affected area, causing di culties in responding to an evacuation by directly in uencing all vital elements of surge capacity, i.e., staff including medical and non-medical personnel, stuff such as medical devices, space like needed areas to be modi ed to either treatment zones or shelters, and system which refers to practical or mutual guidelines (4S), thus disrupting the delivery of healthcare resources 14 .…”