Oral Presentation Script

Anna Shaw

Introduction:
- In elementary school, we’re taught to call 911 in an emergency. Which, don’t get me
wrong, is a great thing to teach little kids, but what if calling an ambulance isn’t the best
thing to do?
- When I was 7 years old, my sister fell and got a severe injury that needed emergency
medical care. Instead of calling 911, my parents drove past three perfectly good hospitals
to get her the care that she needed.
- I’m Anna Shaw, and I’m studying emergency transportation of trauma patients.

Body:
- In this class, we study what we want. We started by choosing a broad topic- mine was
based on my career interest, which is emergency services. Then, we narrowed it down. I
focused on the mortality of trauma victims, with the aim of optimizing transportation for
the best chance of survival.
- I settled on studying the emergency transportation of trauma patients, specifically
whether or not stabilizing people at the scene of the accident is more beneficial and
provides a lower chance of mortality than putting a patient into a police car and getting
them to the hospital as quick as possible. This debate is called “stay and play vs. load and
go”.
- I thought I’d help you understand my topic and why I chose it with a hypothetical
scenario. [insert poorly drawn stick figure with “you” label]- imagine, for a second, that
this is you.
- So you get into your car, you’re blasting Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, you’re lookin foward
to the weekend, and then you crash. You know you’re hurt pretty badly. A police officer
is the first one to arrive on the scene. The officer has the option to load you into the back
of his or her car and bring you to the nearest hospital. This is the “load and go” option. If
you wait for an ambulance to arrive, the paramedics can try to stabilize you at the scene
of the accident before taking you to a hospital. This is the “stay and play” option.
- This choice, however, is not as simple as “how badly are you hurt?” There are so many
factors that play in to prehospital care. For example, you could be in the middle of
nowhere, somewhere like Glenelg, where hospitals are miles away. In this case, being
stabilized before getting to the hospital might be the better idea. Or, you could be two
blocks away from the nearest shock trauma center. Here, it might be better to just get you
 to the hospital because calling an ambulance, putting in an IV, and then driving to the
shock trauma center might take longer than just loading and going.
- A study on this topic showed that, among trauma patients brought to a hospital, those
who were transported via ambulance had a 28.8% mortality rate. Those who were
transported by private vehicle or a police officer had a 14.1% mortality rate. This was
still true after the study was corrected for injury severity. Isn’t that kinda weird? I mean,
ambulances were developed so mortality rates could decrease, not increase, right? If
that’s true, then why are more people dying in ambulances than in a car?
- As it turns out, prehospital care has a lot to do with that. For example, if a paramedic
arrives on scene and decides the patient needs a breathing tube, they have to administer it.
Doing that could take away precious time and worsen your chances at living.
- At the same time, if someone simply chucks you into the back of their car and speeds
away to the nearest hospital, you could end up in worse condition than you started.
- Each situation is unique, so every situation should require a specialised response.
- I would like to further investigate the debate. I would observe mortality rates among
those who are transported immediately after the accident via private transport and those
who are given advanced or basic life support before being transported. I will use my
advisor to guide me in the right direction as far as my own research goes.
Conclusion:
- So let’s go back to you- if you were actually in that car crash, you would want to be
transported to a hospital using the method that yields the least chance of mortality, right?
Everyone would.
- With my research, I would like to develop a system of determining which method, under
which circumstances, in which place, would produce the best outcome. Providing
guidelines that could eventually be widely understood, like calling 911, could save many
lives.
- I told you a story in the beginning of my talk about my sister. Instead of calling 911, my
parents recognized that she did not have a life-threatening injury, so they called around to
several hospitals in Maryland, trying to decide which hospital would provide my sister
with the best care for her injury. We ended up driving nearly an hour to Johns Hopkins
for the best possible care, whereas an ambulance would have driven us 25 minutes for
less specialized care. In this case, load and go was the right choice.
- Thank you.