What do BASICS doctors add to standard ambulance care?
They can anaesthetise you if you’re critically injured. That allows them to make sure you can breathe properly (by putting a tube into your windpipe) so you don’t choke or inhale vomit, two common problems with severe injury. Anaesthetic medicines don’t just put you to sleep – in the case of severe head injury it allows your brain to shut down and recover, and can stop it expanding and causing more damage. They can administer high-level pain relief. Paramedics can administer some pain killing drugs like morphine, but doctors can use more potent drugs where the pain is intense – especially when it’s needed to safely extricate a patient and too much morphine would be dangerous. They can also operate in extreme circumstances. BASICS Hampshire doctors have saved lives by doing urgent operations on the windpipe (cricothyroidotomy) or the chest wall (thoracostomy) and even open-heart surgery (thoracotomy). What else do they do? They have the authority to send the patient to the best hospital
