Every day, people with acute illness and injury—such as accidents, infections, heart attacks and strokes, asthma, and acute complications of pregnancy—seek medical care. As a result of this daily incidence, an emergency care system has been developed that can recognize early and manage acute illnesses and injuries that can save a lot of lives. Thus, there is a need for a working, quality, and properly implemented emergency care system to be able to achieve this goal, particularly pre-hospital care.
Pre-hospital care, a part of emergency medical services, is the initial care provided in the pre-hospital environment. It improves outcomes for patients especially for those with acute life-threatening conditions and in improving access to health care—with the help of human resources, transport, equipment, and information technologies. This is achieved by providing time-sensitive diagnosis and interventions to prevent mortality and morbidity in the pre-hospital setting, affecting the final outcome or prognosis. Proper coordination of these components is important as this can decrease transport time, and thus decrease time from incident to the definitive intervention, which can affect the rate of mortality and complications.
Pre-hospital care is vital. However, after watching Ambulansya de Paa and even by just looking at the patients in PGH or from our case discussions and SGDs, in a third-world country like the Philippines, there are a lot of aspects that need to be improved on in our pre-hospital care systems—human resources, transport, equipment, and information technologies. These are just components of a bigger whole, a system. To address these systemic problems interconnected in a complicated web, good governance, political will, and policies are needed. That's where public health comes in. When health is prioritized, so will be the improvement of our pre-hospital care and emergency care system.