Tranexamic Acid: What You Should Know

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Trauma can be messy. The scene after a good trauma case is most likely littered with empty bags of crystalloid and the plastic wrappers of dressings and IV catheters. And blood. Lots of blood.  For severe trauma patients that make it to a trauma center, exsanguination is a common cause of death. What else can be done beyond direct pressure, hemostatic gauze, and early tourniquet application (assuming the injury is even in a tourniquet-able location)? How can a patient be resuscitated without fluid boluses that turn their blood to Kool-Aid on your ambulance floor?

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Trauma Arrest for the Rest of Us: What to Do in the Field

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Traumatic cardiac arrest management has become a hotly debated topic recently, especially in the FOAMed world.  The data we have is rather poor, and there are relatively few studies that have looked into the issue.  For prehospital providers, there aren’t many choices in the first place when it comes to managing these patients so I want to outline what we know and where we stand...

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Welcome to EMFirst!

Welcome!  We wanted our first blog post to give you some background on the blog and some idea of the directions in which we hope to be heading.  Please contact us with any questions or issues that you think we may have skipped.  

EMFirst was first conceived in Spring 2015 by authors Benn and Pratik as a way to bring EMS into the #FOAMed revolution.  We have a strong passion for pre-hospital medicine and all that is related and want to bring our small amount of combined knowledge to the global EMS community however we can.  We love the idea of FOAM and think that knowledge, especially that which can improve medical care in any way, is all but wasted if not freely and openly shared with anyone who's listening.  We'll be using a blog format for the time being, with posts coming anywhere from weekly to monthly.  Subject matter will be pertinent to EMS, but will range from actual patient care to system operations to tangential topics that we just feel like talking about.  Bear with us while we get started, and thanks for coming along for the ride!