Pre-hospital care includes the initial triage and treatment of the patient at the scene followed by the transport to the available health center and handover to the emergency department. When an ambulance is called, this is performed by emergency medical services (EMS) responders. It allows patients to be safely and speedily transported to centers which can aid in the management of acute life-threatening conditions, as well as establishes temporizing measures that could stabilize the patient so that they can survive for longer and have improved prognosis.
However, pre-hospital care is dependent on several factors, such as personal, socioeconomic, and environmental. It is useless to have adequate and reliable pre-hospital care like ambulances when the patients and their families are not aware of what constitutes emergencies. Education plays an important role in pre-hospital care so that the patients can identify true emergencies, call the appropriate numbers, and be transported to the health center or hospital in a short amount of time. Furthermore, education of the family and community would also play a role since the use of CPR is one of the most effective measures of improving outcomes and giving the patient more time to be saved in an emergency. For communities which have never been trained in basic CPR, patients may have already passed away by the time that the ambulance arrives. This is especially true in the Philippines, where the traffic can delay arrival at the hospital. In Ambulansyang-de-Paa, the socioeconomic and environmental factors affecting pre-hospital care are evident. For far-flung and rural communities, there is no easy way to gain access to a hospital setting. Their so-called “pre-hospital care” is dependent on the goodwill of the community and kindness of their neighbors and rural doctors who attend to their needs and walk or carry them for several hours to their destination. The brand-new health facilities that were shown in the documentary are useless when those communities that are supposed to use them cannot even access them. Even though ambulances and emergency vehicles are available, the road infrastructure is inadequate, and the communities are too isolated. It is clear that the rural community in the documentary relies solely on their lone physician. It’s a tragedy to see patients that could have been saved if only they had been brought to healthcare centers earlier.
Pre-hospital care must be improved in the country. It must be made a priority of the government to be able to adequately address the gaps in healthcare, be it in the number of healthcare workers, the access to facilities, the available equipment, the education programs, or the methods of safe and speedy transportation. Trying to address only one factor is a band-aid measure that will eventually fail as long as the other factors are still impeding patient access to healthcare.