Emergency Medical Technicians’ Ethical ‎Challenges in the Pre-hospital Emergency ‎Services: A Review Article

Introduction: Due to the complexity, stressfulness, and the nature of the threatening situations of pre-hospital activities, Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) face many ethical challenges in making decisions and providing quick and accurate care to patients. The present study aimed to investigate the ethical challenges among pre-hospital actions. Methodology: To review all published studies, the search was carried out in SID, MEDLIB, IRAN MEDEX, MAGIRAN, Web of Science, Medline, Google Scholar, CINAHL, PubMed, Ovid, and SCOPUS databases. The keywords are Ethical challenges, Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT), Pre-hospital emergency. It contains the pre-hospital care during 2000-2018. Results: According to the evaluation of the studies, the ethical challenge regarding pre-hospital emergencies includes deciding to dispatch an ambulance to the scene, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, triage in crisis and disaster, irrational interventions of the patient or patient's family, intervention in accordance with patient's informed consent, and safe driving. Conclusion: considering the unique and different conditions of caring for the pre-hospital caring, identifying and discovering the ethical conflicts in this field of health care system and providing the appropriate solution is very important.