This is a descriptive study of 1623 patients intubated outside hospital. It portrays a very dramatic statistic on survival, which would suggest at best, intubation without drugs is a waste of time.
| 1) | I think it would help to describe setting briefly. Why are the data so old? |
| 2) | How good is record keeping? It would help to be reassured that if drugs were used it was recorded, and this was validated in some way. |
| 3) | I assume the second sentence on page 2 should be 'data about survival were unavailable'. |
| 4) | How was survival defined? Until arrival at hospital, until discharge or what? We must have survival of those intubated with drugs, by physician/paramedic as a contrast, before we can say that it is the intubation without drugs that is the problem. |
| 5) | This leads on from (4).Why were patients intubated without drugs, especially by physicians? Presumably the patients were at much greater risk anyway. |
| 6) | It seems to me that intubation with drugs may carry a risk of oesophageal intubation. I assume intubation without drugs carries a much higher risk. These risks don't really explain such poor survival. |
| 7) | Ref7 should be ref 6. |
M.J. Campbell