Integrating The Sociology Of Standards With Community Paramedicine

Abstract

As of 2019, over 130 community paramedicine (CP) programs exist internationally. These are the goals that community paramedicine seeks to achieve: prevent hospital readmissions, reduce frequent EMS (emergency medical service) and ED (emergency department) user’s reliance on emergency services, provide alternative and more appropriate destinations for patient care, and chronic disease management by increasing patient access to primary care services. There is no way of assessing if these common goals are being met because programs today use a diversity of different strategies, techniques, and measurements when providing care. This reflects different electronic interfaces, different patient referral forms, different program evolution patterns, and different program strategies. For example, the use of an urban or rural community paramedicine model, or the use of one software in favor of another. The consequences of these different strategies include: failure to legitimize CP as an emerging type of healthcare, failure to optimally control program costs, failure to develop a language for communication that is understood by all community paramedics, failure to make data comparable between different programs, and failure to advance the outlined goals of CP. Drawing on the sociology of standards, this thesis proves that terminological and procedural standards can address these problems by creating a common language for communication and clinical practice guidelines for all community paramedics. Without the creation of such standards, the above consequences will not be remedied. Community paramedicine programs will have the ability to overcome the consequences I have listed through the creation and implementation of these standards.