Pre-hospitalization Advanced Airway Management Using The KING LTS-D^TMand the LMA ProSeal^TM

Abstract

It is very critical to promptly maintain airway of cardiac arrest cases or serious traumatic cases. The purpose of this study is to compare intubation rate, successful rate and pre-/post-education self-confidence between laryngeal tube (LTS) and proseal laryngeal mask (PLMA), so that it may contribute to improving the ability of 119 emergency team -a pivotal role in pre-hospitalization process -to carry out advanced airway management. In order to achieve the purpose, total 60 paramedics (Class Ⅰ) who worked for incumbent 119 emergency team were asked to join a practical experiment and were also divided into two groups (LTS group: 30 people, PLMA group: 30 people). In details, they were all asked to take 3 sessions of practice (5 minutes per session) using dummy model to quantitatively measure the time and success/failure of intubation and the change of their self-confidence. As a result, it was found that there were statistically significant differences in the time of intubation between LTS and PLMA group (p=.000), but there was no significant difference in the rate of successful intubation between these two groups, and self-confidence of two groups tended to significantly increase after experiment (p=.000). Conclusively, if it is necessary to promptly apply intubation to traumatic cases with immobilized cervical vertebral and lingual edema, LTS can be useful as an effective means of intubation. And it is expected that continuing intubation training using LTS will improve the ability of emergency team to perform advanced airway management for traumatic cases.