Can emergency medical service staff predict the disposition of patients they are transporting?

Emergency medical service (EMS) staff in the UK routinely transport all emergency responses to the nearest emergency department (ED). Proposed reforms in the ambulance service mean that EMS staff will transport patients not necessarily to the nearest hospital, but to one providing facilities that the patient is judged to require. No previous UK studies have evaluated how accurately EMS staff can predict which transported patients will require admission to hospital. https://emj.bmj.com/content/25/10/691 This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/emj.2007.05492