Emergency Medical Services in France - Hospital Standards For SAMU

Hospital Standards For SAMU

French hospitals (whether publicly or privately run) must operate an emergency department (service spécialisé d'accueil et de traitement des urgences) only if it is capable of treating the common trauma and illness conditions that are likely to present. This normally includes a resuscitation unit, general and internal medicine, cardio-vascular medicine, pediatrics, anesthesiology-resuscitation, orthopedic surgery and oncology, including obstetrics. The exception would be for specialised units, which only admit specific pathologies or specific types of patients (e.g. pediatrics). These units are termed 'pôle spécialisé d'accueil et de traitement des urgences'.

The hospital must have two operating rooms (and a recovery room) with personnel on duty that allow operation at any time, as well as support services that can perform additional examination or analysis at any time, such as medical imaging (radiography, medical ultrasonography, CAT Scanners, haematology, toxicology laboratory etc.

The specialized service is managed by an emergency physician. An emergency physician must always be "on-call," and a specialized physician can be called at any time. In addition the team must have two nurses, care assistants (and possibly child care assistants), a social worker and a receptionist, with all of them having received specific education for dealing with emergency cases.

The service is organized in three zones:

• a reception zone,
• a zone for the examination and the cares (including intensive cares),
• a zone for the watch over short durations (patients waiting to go out or for a transfer in another service).

Most services also have a massive crowd room that are designed to allow care of a large number of patients, outside of the normal levels of presenting patients. These plan blanc units are designed to cope with major incidents or epidemics.

SAMU is the regional Medical Emergency Response Center (MERC) in day to day monitoring and "regulation" of all Hospitals and Ambulances Emergency care Resources in its area and is connected with limitroph SAMU. In case of disaster the French SAMU national network of a national Integrated Emergency Medical System (IEMS) is in charge of the first emergency phase medico sanitary planned response called "Plans blancs" and of secondary ground or aerial transports if necessary.