The Southwest is currently experiencing triple-digit temperatures as the season’s first heat wave sweeps through Phoenix, the country’s hottest great city, using new strategies to save more lives in a region that saw 645 heat-related deaths last year.
The Phoenix Fire Department will begin ice-dipping sunstroke victims into snow on their approach to nearby hospitals this time. Marathon runners and military personnel are familiar with the physician approach known as warm water immersion, and it has just been used as a follow-up protocol in Phoenix hospitals, according to Fire Capt. John Prato.
In an impervious blue case surrounded by a patient-representing ice cubes, Prato demonstrated the technique earlier this year outside Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix. He claimed that the method was quickly significantly lower body temperature.
” Just last week we had a critical person that we were able to bring back before we walked through the crisis place gates,” Prato said. ” That’s our goal — to improve patient survivability”.
Snow and human-sized soaking bags are now standard equipment on all Phoenix fire division emergency cars as a result of the heatstroke care. As the city’s temperatures and individual toll rise even higher this year, it is one of the measures it has taken. This summer, Phoenix will also keep two cooling facilities available immediately.
The National Weather Service predicted that south California and northern Arizona will experience “easily their hottest” conditions since September, making emergency response teams in the region prepared for it.
Extreme heat warnings were issued for parts of southern Nevada and Arizona from Wednesday morning through Friday evening, with highs anticipated to top 110 degrees Fahrenheit ( 43. 3 Celsius ) in Las Vegas and Phoenix. By the trip, the extremely hot weather was forecast to distribute north and into parts of the Pacific Northwest.
Officials in Maricopa County were shocked earlier this year when ultimate figures revealed 645 heat-related deaths in the state’s largest state, the majority of which occurred in Phoenix. The most brutal period was a heat wave with 31 subsequent days of temperatures of 110 degrees Fahrenheit ( 43.4 Celsius ) or higher, which claimed more than 400 lives.
According to Dr. Paul Pugsley, clinical director of emergency medicine at Valleywise Health, “we’ve been seeing a significant uptick in the last three years in cases of extreme temperature illness.” Of those, about 40 % do not succeed.
He claimed that cooling down people before they arrive in the emergency room may alter the situation.
According to Pugsley, the strategy “is not very commonly used in non-military hospitals in the United States, nor does it affect first responders or fire departments in the prehospital setting.” He claimed that a piece of that may be the conceit that first responders or perhaps clinics should use the technique for all circumstances of heatstroke.
Pugsley claimed to be aware of the practice’s minimal application in some Californian locations, including the San Antonio Fire Department’s Texas fire department’s San Antonio Fire Department and Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto and Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno.
According to Dr. Aneesh Narang, associate clinical director of emergency medicine at Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix, the method was adopted next summer.
He claimed that “here is the accepted standard of care for people with sunstroke.”
