mrt2113

Actually, maybe this town would be kinda neat to live in. Apparently, they are retro 70's letting kids run the EMS and wearing total white with black belts and mega patches. Wow! I bet they still have visibars and Q-2 sirens! Maybe they still carry the old Gould monitors and use telemetry and glass IV bottles. A real living EMS museum!

I do wonder about how many responses a year they do and as well what happens when they turn 18 or graduate from high school.. do they get banned?

R/r 911

Yea tey probably till ride around in the old hearses with the engine driven sirens lol

You live in louisville? Where abouts do you live? I'm from there and my grandparents live there now.

Only a few times.

It is very dangerous, and gets worse with more traffic.

Once and a while, an ambulance or police cruiser will run interference near the hospital. The ER is located on a side street of a major one way road. If the one way road can be safely blocked...

We have to be careful. Frequently, the cruisers are responding with us, and are either just ahead, or just behind us. If the call is more police then EMS, we will shut off the lights and sirens, and them vice-versa. Stealth mode.

We do not turn on lights and sirens at an intersection to "help" an ambulance get through, I tried it once and screwed evryone up costing the other ambulence 30 seconds and life threataning manuvers, however if i am pulling out of the hospital(ours is located on the street to) and another rig is coming i will stop oncoming traffic as the rest of our crew will do for us. We have had our PD do this a few times for me and they are quite good at it

In my service we don't fly much because our ER is five minutes or so away at any time. And we have two level 1 trauma centers about 20 mins away when I'm driving and a level 2 about 10 or so. We have had to fly peds out though because the ped center is a good 45 mins from here.

If i left ems i would have to get a real job & maybe have to work.

That scares me........

I agree thats what I meant if i tried to leave i would have to work get fed up an come back hours later

I couldn't quit if I wanted to.

have you ever taken a vehicle rescue class?? we all don't have the dustdevil magic dust to toss over vehicles to make the doors open. doors are locked... pt needs out.. no time to mess with tools to unlock them. ie slim jim.. they only work for certain kinds of locks, MANUAL locks.. and even then.. they are hard to use.. especially with gloves. and breaking the glass is for your own protection, and the patients protection when and if there is a need to pop a door.

Ok if the patient ever needs out that bad chances are the glass is either alread broken or FD is on scene extricating. If I were ever in a real pinch yes I would break the glass but for the most part glass is either broken or FD is there. You cant tell me your FD isnt either on scene before u get there or seconds after you. In every volly,paid,or other service I've been in they havent been more than a minute out in almost any situation.

How would removing the roof have made any real difference to the way this was done...except remove a rescue unit 40km from its base and standing around waiting a long time?

Volunteer fire here is not rescue capable (in this state anyway)

For an MVA here fire rescue always responds and this is a paid service. It doesn't take them more than a couple of minutes to get the equipment running and begin extrication. Ussually by the the time we roll up to the scene fire is already there extricating. And I didn't mean the alwas remove the roof of the car. They do the safest fastest way to get the t out.

Although a new hand at EMS, im reasonably well experienced at fire and assisting with extrication. Most windws are busted by the accident anyway, so i think ive done this twice now. One was a back window to extricate the pt through, the other was a rear side window to get someone in the back as the doors were that buckled we could not get them open

In this case our fire would take the roof right off the car witrh the jaws of life.

I remain extremely sceptical of the frequency of this need some of you seem to find to break windows on a routine basis. In over thirty years, I still have fingers left over after counting all of the windows I have had to break. Yes, there were plenty that I could have broken if I wanted to. But the fact remains that the actual need to break windows is a lot less common than a lot of low-time rookies here want to believe. If you are breaking windows this frequently, you seriously need to go back for some more schooling, or simply slow the F down and use your head instead of breaking windows on every damn wrecked car you find. If you're making such poor judgements in access and extrication, your medical judgements are also suspect. Think about it.

And if you're breaking glass, you ought to be wearing gloves anyhow, so the lack of the plastic guards shouldn't be relevant.

And if you are so into being prepared for every possible eventuality that you would run out and buy Big Shears, then there is no excuse for not having gloves on you too.

you don't know how much I agree with that. Most of the time when I show up to an accident the glass is already broken or the door is unlocked and openable because the person is still concious. I've broken glass a whole one time, to get intoa car where some idiot left his keys inside and had to get in (me). It cost me about 300 dollars to get that window fixed too. Any other time I leave it up to FD to do it. They ussually turn the car into a convertible in about 30 seconds flat. Rollovers=alreadybroken glass everything else= FD or doors unlocked or person in the car opens the door. hoe many of you actually think it is critical to break that window.

anyother crash= FD or unlocked doors

My policy when I roll up to a scene with other ems I turn on my rear ambers and the front in grill lights and the directional arrows. If it is just our rig on a side street or other street with little to no traffic I may turn just the directional arrows and thats it. On a main thuroghfare by myself(almost neever happens) I'll leave the lights on but I try to keep it to a minumum. When my partner drives he hops off the rig and leaves everything else on, and he sometimes forgets to turn off the sirens and I have o run back to the rig and do wasting time.

I don't know what to say about this situation. Open fraction, bleeding like hell, I probabl would have pushed the drugs myself and had the EMT continue what i was doing. What was the medic doing that was so important that he couldn't push the drug. Controlling the bleeding or closing rhe wound, both the EMT could have done. There are alot of unknowns here. From what I know now I would have pushed it myself and had the EMT continue what I was doing just to keep both of our asses safe. Why do I care I ride with another medic anyway, but thats what I would have done.

MRT

As far as the Good Sam thing goes, if you accept anything you could be on shaky ground. Here is a wiki reference and another reference to a site that seems to have a good deal of info (admittedly I have not gone through it, but maybe someone can and let us know). I have a feeling it might depend on the mood of the judge the day that you show up in court, but I am basing that on very little information and very little sleep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law

http://medi-smart.com/gslaw.htm

First of all, wikipedia is the most unreliable source you will ever use. Anyone can put anything there... and i mean anything

I don't know about the other site but I don't identify myself as a medic unless there was an emergency on the plane. I fly between 20 and 30 times a year and the worst I have seen as someone said before a diabetic who needed a cup of orange juice to a little kit crying because he had a paper cut and in both instances I kept watching my movie.

I had a call like this a year or two ago. The paramedic I was with had an ingenious idea for a cpr mask for a dog. He took a water bottle and cut the bottom off and slid the top half over the snout. Then he took the cap off and provided respirations that way. Compressions are preformed behind front leg.

Yeah in there new show saved. They get the call from dispatch in one rig,show up at the scene in another, and get to the ER in another, its funny to watch. They argue with the cops for 10 minutes on a critical patient before pputting him in the rig.

I can tell many have never worked at CAD systems, and if one was to stop and render care, then they could be held negligible for time delay to the initial call.... many systems only allow those in that assigned area to respond to calls.

R/r 911

When i said that I meant an ambulance that isnt on a call,it saw the accident and drove by

For some of us, EMS is a job, not a lifestyle. Just like most computer technicians don't get overwhelmed by the urge to run and help random people with their Microsoft nightmares, many of us don't salivate at the prospect of crawling around other people's wrecks off duty.

It's a job, people. Not a lifestyle. Not a calling. Not a hobby. Just a job.

yes but a computer technician is totally different, people arent dieing because theyre somputer4s arent working, You dont take a 6 month course just for a really really low pay job. It isnt about the money for most people(we dont make enough for it to be), it is a lifestyle for a lot of us

screw them all, they can die. No I refuse to carry anything. My cell phone is the only thing I always have with me even then no guarantee I will use it.

In my car I have a small airway kit, just enough to attempt keeping someone alive until EMS arrives which hopefully is quickly.

If they die.....more food for the rest of us.

wtf is wrong with you, you should have your certs pulled. enough said

Maybe I'm naive, which is a distinct possibility...I've been doing this for over a year, and my mom has been in EMS for 22 years, so I would say I have a pretty good feel for how things work. My question is, everyone in here is talking about a duty to act if you see an accident, but how many of you could drive by a bad accident if you saw one? I don't get the logic that if you saw an accident with the potential of injury you wouldn't atleast stop and check on the occupants of said vehicles. This excludes fender benders, or silly little accidents, but if I saw a significant MVA, I don't think I would have to worry about a "duty to act" I would act. Now granted, you're limited (atleast I am) to a pair of gloves and whatever napkins I can pull out of my glove box. However, I think offering first aid, calling 9-1-1 and holding c-spine until providers with equiptment show up is not much to ask of an EMT/Medic. Maybe that's just me...

I totally agree, why would you become an emt and not want to help people off duty of not??? If you see an MVA it should be your duty to act not a law. If you were in a bad MVA and an ambulance drove by because he wasnt dispatched to the call what would you think(besides how to get that crew fired)?