Development of a Community-based Pre-hospital Care Management Model for Emergency Volunteers

Abstract

     Using Community Action Research (CAR), this study constructed a model for community-based prehospital care management for emergency volunteers (EVs). The study was conducted in three phases: exploration of the community context including a needs assessment; capacity building and evaluation of the management of EVs; and evaluation of the previous two phases. There were 126 participants in the study who provided data through group interviews, in-depth interviews, workshops, forums and from lessons learned. Data analysis was conducted by content analysis, free-list analysis, concurrent analysis, and mean difference methods. Findings were as follows: (1) people in a remote rural community practiced reciprocity in pre-hospital care within a hybrid of functional and interpretive management paradigms and in doing so took the major responsibility to organize and manage a system to respond to emergencies that includes informal organization, flexible rules, communications, and budgeting, but with some support from government; (2) the management of emergency volunteers was within a Hybrid model composed of the functional and interpretive paradigms and this affected recruitment and retention of emergency volunteers; and (3) evaluation of emergency volunteers depended on the paradigm with evaluation in the functional paradigm depending on a quantitative approach but in the interpretive approach it depended on qualitative methods. Results also showed that the Hybrid model was effective for managing emergency volunteers, and built self-confidence among the participants. This model can be used in similar remote rural areas with policy to be formulated for the management of emergency volunteers.