What is the importance of pre-hospital care in improving outcomes for patients especially for those with acute life-threatening conditions and in improving access to health care?”
Pre-hospital care involves everything that happens to the patient prior to their arrival to the hospital for medical treatment. This can involve the resting and waiting at home that the patient normally does first before finally going to the clinic, as well as all the interventions done for the patient during this time, such as the proper or improper nutrition being given, the proper or improper medications given, etc. Even the process of bringing the patient to the clinic and everything involved with that are elements of pre-hospital care, and it shows that pre-hospital care is influenced by, not only the health sector, but many different sectors of society. One demonstration of this is how the accessibility to health care is influenced by the infrastructure that is in place in the form of (or the lack of) roads, vehicles, and hospitals to reach the right health care required, and these should ideally be provided by the local government unit.
Pre-hospital care here is most clearly seen as well in the form of the clinic that one of the patients with tuberculosis was brought to. Because there was at least some access to a clinic nearby, the patient was able to receive the right treatment for his tuberculosis without having to go to the hospital. The presence of this clinic allowed the patients to receive health care and to make it more accessible to them, though there was still much difficulty to get there given the lack of infrastructure mentioned earlier.
In acute life-threatening situations, the lack of roads and vehicles leads to less access to proper health care, and these could lead to an increase in morbidity and mortality because they are unable to get the right health care in time. The clinic in the video was a pre-hospital care facility that allowed patients to receive some kind of health care before being brought to the hospital. This kind of intervention had probably allowed better outcomes for the patient, and this shows how vital pre-hospital care facilities are to the improvement of health care access and to treat patients with acute life-threatening conditions.