Lifting and Moving Experiences– an interesting look at alternatives to the log-roll
Prehospital Emergency Care has just published the abstracts for the 2010 NAEMSP scientific assembly and there are a number of interesting topics being presented. One that caught my eye was “Lifting as an alternative to the log roll technique in the prehospital management of traumatic spine cord injury” by Bradley Demeter and John Borstad at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
In this article, the authors applied a tracking device to a cadaver spine and measured movement using the log roll and “alternative” lifting techniques and found that lifting was superior to the log-roll in preventing movement. Even more interesting; after creating an unstable spinal injury, lifting was still superior in preventing spinal movement.
I had suspected that this was true while working on a training program for Acadian Ambulance medics on the management of football players with a suspected spinal injury, but it is really neat to see this confirmed.
In the lesson, we emphasized a technique recommended by the National Athletic Trainers Association called the “6 –man Lift”.
During filming and photography, we easily lifted a very large football player in full gear while maintaining spinal alignment and everyone involved remarked about how effective the method worked.
Of course, we had seven rescuers, six to lift the victim and one to slide the board into place along with plenty of room to work. In the real world, everything is a trade-off and EMS crews will seldom have the luxury of this many hands and enough space to slide the board in from the feet. In a bathroom at 0200, this just is not going to work.
If you have not had a chance to look at this year’s abstracts, I strongly urge you to get a copy of the January 2010 supplement and take a look at where EMS research is going, in a few years, we may be teaching a lot of what is being presented in this symposium.
As always, we look forward to hearing from you here at Your Studio A
Chris Mixon
Add comment June 24th, 2010
