On 26th April, Kim Kirby, a clinical academic paramedic at South Western Ambulance Service and PhD candidate at University of the West of England gave the CaHRU research seminar. Kim is funded on a National Institute for Health Research Clinical Academic Doctoral Research Fellowship Award. Her fellowship explored how the ambulance service can improve the recognition and response to patients contacting the ambulance service who are at imminent risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
One of the objectives of the fellowship utilised conversation analysis to analyse ambulance emergency call data involving calls for patients who were alive at the time of the 999 call and then subsequently suffered an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Conversation analysis focuses on what participants are doing or achieving in, and through their talk. Talk involves social action (asking or complaining), action sequences and turn taking.
Kim 
analysed a sample of 50 anonymised emergency call recordings and transcripts and completed conversation analysis on the opening sequence of the emergency call. The analysis revealed long delays in responding to certain questions, such as “Is the patient breathing” suggesting these were poorly understood or confusing.
The seminar was very well attended and received with a lively question and discussion session afterwards. If you would like see the seminar recording click here, and to attend future seminars, please contact Sue Bowler sbowler@lincoln.ac.uk for details.