PRECRU News: Dr Marine Riou wins best poster

24 May 2017

Dr Marine Riou, Dr Stephen Ball and Dr Teresa Williams presented posters at the European Emergency Medical Congress, held from 22 to 24 May 2017 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Dr Riou was awarded Best Poster at the conference.

A synopsis of her presentation follows:

If you had to call 000 for a medical emergency, how would you describe the situation to the call-taker? This study analysed emergency calls made by members of the public for patients who were having a cardiac arrest, a condition where every second counts. We focused on the following sentence said by call-takers: “tell me exactly what happened”. Our results indicate that callers often respond with a long narrative containing irrelevant details – for example, saying what they were doing when the incident occurred. We identified a simple solution: if the tense of the sentence was changed to “tell me exactly what’s happened”, callers were 4 times more likely respond with a  short and efficient report. Saving time can help saving lives, and one way to do that is to identify the communicative strategies that work best.