Emergency medical services in France
Local SAMU organisations operate the control rooms that answer emergency calls and dispatch medical responders.
A law in 1986 defined SAMU organizations as hospital-based services providing permanent telephone support, choosing and dispatching the proper response for a phone call request.
The central component of SAMU is the dispatch centre where a team of physicians and assistants answer calls, triage the patients' complaints and respond to them.
Their options include: This means that the SAMU controls a variety of resources within a community from general practitioners to hospital intensive care services.
[6] Here, the cross-trained firefighters will provide on scene care and transport for injuries or illness, but are usually backed up by a SMUR unit for more serious or complex cases.
They are typically labelled as "SAMU", though that term actually refers to either the overall system or the local EMS organization that the SMUR units are part of.
The result is that a SMUR unit will typically spend a long time on scene compared with a paramedic ambulance in a different system, as the physician may conduct a full set of observations, examinations and interventions before removal to hospital.
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.
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.).
been recognized as a distinct medical specialty in France,[10][11] and efforts to further recognise pre-hospital emergency medicine as a sub-specialty are at an early stage.
Many SMUR/MICU physicians are actually in training for other specialties, such as anaesthesiology, who have special interest or are gaining experience in critical emergency medicine.
This will ultimately, in turn, result in physicians becoming less likely to respond to emergencies outside the hospital, though they are still expected to play a major role in the immediate future.
[13] operating on protocols[14] France, along with the rest of the continental European Union (and the UK) uses the emergency telephone number available across all members 112, which gives access to police, fire and ambulance services.
When operating in the public system, patients are asked to co-pay a portion of the cost for each type of care that they receive.
All requests for ambulance service are processed by the local SAMU, which will determine what type of assistance and transportation resources are sent; the patient has no choice in the matter when it is an Intensive Urgent Care Need.
