A study by members of the CaHRU team, Fiona Togher, Dr Zowie Davy and Professor Niroshan Siriwardena, to better understand the elements of care that are most important to patients with stroke and heart attack accessing the ambulance service, has been published in the Emergency Medicine Journal http://emj.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/emermed-2012-201507.

The qualitative study involved interviewing both patients and clinicians about their experiences of either receiving or providing care prehospital care for stroke or heart attack. Four main themes emerged:

• communication
• professionalism
• treatment of condition
• transition from home to hospital.

The technical knowledge and relational skills of clinicians’ together contributed to patients’ perceptions of professionalism in ambulance personnel. We found that the patient experience was enhanced when physical, emotional and social needs were attended to. Effective clinician–patient communication was also found to be a key component of high quality patient care.

Fiona Togher, who was lead author for the study, has recently been awarded a PhD studentship at Lincoln. The findings will be used to inform her doctoral research, which will examine the potential for developing a generic patient reported experience measure (PREM) for routine use in ambulance services in the UK