Tdillon193

Paramedic Shove! What a great expression. I have definitely been a victim of that a time or two. The good thing about my fire dept. is that our officers definitely won't put up with that. In each case, our EMS coordinator and/or fire chief would call the ambulance service and arrange a meeting afterward with the offending paragod. It usually would humble them a bit, and they would be less obnoxious on the next call. In my experience, it's been the newer paramedics who tend to be the obnoxious ones. The old veterans are very cool, and we have a good rapport with them. The new ones come in and push everybody around and treat us like first responder students, until they learn that we actually know what we're doing and can be a big help to them.

I definitely think officer positions should be filled based on objective testing, in volunteer or career organizations. Unfortunately, that isn't the case at the volunteer fire dept. where I'm at. It's a vote of the membership, which makes it more of a popularity issue than who's qualified to fill the position. The officer corps. has been talking lately of designing a testing process for future officer candidates, so hopefully that will happen. I think that's the case in more volunteer organizations than not, where it's a vote of the membership rather than a testing process.

Denver Health (911 provider for Denver CO) ran a Polyheme trial a while back. Don't know for sure, but the rumor is that the results were so significantly positive with the blood substitute (vs. just using NS) that they stopped the trial so they could use the Polyheme with all their patients. At any rate, they now carry it on their ambulances from what I hear. They'd be a good agency to check with about Polyheme, www.denverems.org