Background: Emergency Medical Services (EMS) often provide the golden hour of care in most emergency and disaster settings. EMS systems utilise unique, disciplined and sensitive approaches to the identification and stabilisation of patients in the prehospital environment. Despite the increasing skill set of prehospital emergency practitioners, the majority of prehospital health care interventions have not been subjected to rigorous research in the form of randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Many international prehospital clinical practice guidelines continue to reflect local needs and traditions rather than evidence based practices. While RCTs are considered to be the gold standard of study design in primary research, they are difficult to conduct in out-of-hospital settings primarily due to the ethical issues involved and the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of the prehospital environment. Therefore, the few RCTs that have been conducted in this setting may suffer from problems in methodology and quality. Trials with poor methodological quality have exaggerated estimates of treatment effect and incomplete reporting of trials cause difficulties in assessing trial methodological quality.

Objective: To examine the quality of reporting of randomised controlled intervention trials (RCTs) in prehospital care.

Methods: The CENTRAL database of the Cochrane Library will be searched for RCTs of trials in prehospital or out-of-hospital setting. An exhaustive list of search terms will be used to identify prehospital trials. Two reviewers will independently assess trials using the CONSORT (Consolidated Standard of Reporting Trials) checklist. Disagreements will be resolved by consensus. Inter-rater reliability will be assessed with percentage agreement. Mean number of checklist items will be reported across all trials. The influence of time (1970s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s) will be explored with logistic regression.

Results: The work is on-going and the results will be presented during the conference.

Conclusion: This study attempts to explore the methodological quality of RCTs conducted in prehospital setting and thereby, highlight the difficulty of conducting them.