Comprehensive patient assessment
One-day course
Paramedics are traditionally taught highly effective systems for rapidly identifying life threats.
Scene assessment → Primary survey → History → Observations → Secondary survey → Treatment → Transport
That remains essential. But increasingly, paramedics encounter patients who are not immediately critically ill and whose problem cannot be identified by an ABCDE assessment alone, such as the breathless patient; the abdominal pain; the dizzy older person, the patient who collapsed but now looks well; or the patient who says: "I just don't feel right."
These presentations demand a different depth of assessment. This programme introduces two complementary modes: Resuscitative assessment: What will kill this patient first? and Diagnostic assessment: What is actually happening to this patient?
The clinician must know when to use each, and when to transition between them.
The Comprehensive patient assessment programme develops paramedics beyond protocol-driven primary and secondary assessment toward a more comprehensive model of clinical examination and diagnostic reasoning.
The programme incorporates assessment principles commonly used across emergency medicine and emergency nursing, including: observation; history; systems review; physical examination; clinical measurement; differential diagnosis; risk assessment and reassessment with particular emphasis on their application in the pre-hospital environment.
Participants repeatedly progress from: "What did I find? "to "What does that finding mean?"