How Paramedics Treat Stroke Victims

Video Transcript

"Paramedic care for strokes. May briefly cover what you might expect if you have a paramedic crew arrive for someone having a stroke. When we arrive on scene we're going to assess the patient, we're going to do some of the tests to determine their symptoms and most likely we're going to want to get moving as soon as possible. There's a few things that we might do; we may give them some oxygen, we might start an IV on them, and we might ask a number of questions while we're on scene, but overall our goal is going to be the same as we have mentioned for the home care. Our main goal is just to get this patient moving to the hospital as soon as possible. We are going to make sure, there are some things that if the patient does go unconscious, we're going to want to make sure that they don't throw up, we're going to make sure that they're breathing okay, that their heart rate is doing okay and we're also going to check to make sure that they're not having an other problems. There's a few other things that we can check, but overall if you determine that it is a stroke that's causing these problems, we're going to just want to get this patient moving as quickly as possible. With the paramedic care, we're going to make sure, one of the things that we want to make sure is that they don't eat or drink anything prior to going to the hospital. We want to make sure that they're able to shallow and it's just in the practice, we don't want them to eat or drink anything prior to going in. Another part of care that we may consider in route to the hospital is there is certain actions that we may take depending on the doctor to control their blood pressure, if their blood pressure becomes extremely high. The way that we work is we always have contact with the medical director who is a doctor at our local hospital and based upon their advise we may alter which care we give."