Mobile Stroke Unit for Pre-hospital Emergency Care (AMSU)

Daniel Phillips

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Emergencies; Stroke, Acute

Treatments: Other: Management

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05330715

292195

Details and patient eligibility

About

Emergency department overcrowding is a major challenge in medicine, leading to a delay in diagnosis and treatment for the patient due to long waiting times. This is very relevant for diseases like acute stroke and other emergencies. The Advanced Mobile Stroke Unit is an ambulance equipped with additional devices to diagnose and treat patients at the emergency site. Patients with less severe conditions can be diagnosed and safely left at home. The objectives of this project are to investigate whether the Advanced Mobile Stroke Unit compared to a normal ambulance enables more accurate triage of patients (treatment at home vs hospital vs specialist vs A&E). The Advanced Mobile Stroke Unit ambulance will be used in a random order of weeks and this will be compared to weeks with normal ambulances. The study will be carried out by the East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust in collaboration with the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust in the East of England. The project is a collaboration with Saarland University, Germany,

Enrollment: 836 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• acute emergency patients 18 years or older, who are identified via the national emergency telephone number 999 or 111with suspected severe medical emergency condition, which is categorised as: breathing problem, seizure, falls with head trauma, headache, sick person with suspected infection, stroke, unconsciousness
• calls Monday to Friday 9am to 5 pm
• written informed consent

Exclusion criteria

• terminally ill patients
• pregnant patients
• patients in cardiac arrest
• patients in custody of Her Majesty's prison service

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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836 participants in 2 patient groups

Advanced Mobile Stroke Unit

Other group

Description:

Prehospital treatment of patients with an advanced Mobile Stroke Unit. The advanced Mobile Stroke Unit is an ambulance equipped with a computed tomography scanner, and additional diagnostic devices, such as point-of-care-laboratory and telemedicine to enable the team to diagnose and initiated specialised treatment of emergency patients at the emergency site.

Treatment:

Other: Management

Conventional ambulance

Other group

Description:

Prehospital emergency care with conventional ambulances.

Treatment:

Other: Management