Just Plain Ruff

If this truly is what happened then shame on them but let's take a step back from the article and think about what was happening 1. you have 3 patients who obviously could not be moved 2. You have a major storm coming and after it hit the hospital if I remember correctly was nearly destroyed. By the time that the three of them realized that this was a hopeless situation there were no ambulances to transport the patients cause I believe the hospital was also under water. 3. No utilities which if the patients were on drips or pumps or ventillator then what the heck was powering the equipment 4. Without utilities running how can they get the patient with all the ancillary stuff on them down or up to a level that they could evac them out. it's impossible to move these types of people down stairs or upstairs. 5. What was the survivability of these patients in the end run? 6. Was it more humane to "put them to sleep" or let them suffocate because their vent didn't work or the pumps that were keeping the lifesaving drugs going in had run out of batteries. Before we chastise these providers we need the whole story. They are still SCREWED BIG TIME IN MY OPINION, BUT we need to step back and find out the entire story.

50% are you sure. That sounds like a pretty big number. I suspect that some of those services with a 50% non transfer rate pass those patients off to a 3rd service. I think 50% is pretty high though. Which services have that 50% rate?

wow, that's a really high number. I'd like to know more. I can't count the number of refusals I've been a part of as a medic but I never had a 36% rate of refusals. That's pretty high in my opinion. I also don't have a clue how many refusals resulted in a trip or admission to the ER but many of the refusals I can imagine were people who actually didn't want to go by EMS and arrived at the hospital by other means. Are you sure those numbers weren't included in the study as the medic knew that the person was going by private car to the ER. That might have affected the numbers too. Also not to bash you or criticize you GAMedic as you have brought some interesting points and questions but before you go pointing out statistics it would behoove you to have the study in front of you so you can put the numbers correctly. NOt stating that you're numbers are wrong but just saying you've heard of a study and think these numbers are the right ones I'd have something to back it up, especially on this forum.

Oh, let's kill the patients and hope we don't get caught. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,204115,00.html

ok, a couple of stories 1. had a 63 year old lady in the upstairs bedroom c/o chest pain. Ran a 12 lead no problems noted. Trusted gut instinct and transported. She coded in the driveway, got the emt back with me, started cpr, shock shock shock, came back. Then coded again in the ER. Flew to KC MO cardiac center. Coded in helicopter. Called her house 6 days later and asked to speak to mr. so and so. It was a woman's voice so I asked how Mary was doin and she said "I'm fine, I got out of the hospital yesterday" I asked her how she felt and she said, "the only pain I have is where you guys broke my sternum" She then proceeded to thank us profusely, she sent a card and a cake on the anniversary of her coding. 2. Cardiac arrest 2nd to foreign body obstruction. The foreign body could not be visualized by laryngoscopy due to patients huge neck. I tried to tube him and met major resistence about 2 centimeters past the vocal cords. I needle cricked the patient, ventillated a few times and felt a lot less resistence on the ventillations, went back in via laryngoscope and there was a huge piece of steak at the vocal cords. REmoved that piece and got him tubed. We coded him to the ER but it was too late. I've never seen a foreign body dislodged this way ever again. Even stomach thrusts wouldn't work. 3. Had a friend roll on a car wreck, woman pinned by sunroof beam. Head crushed. He put her on the monitor and said, she's got a heartrate but no pulse(peripheral pulse) the heart rate was 180 a minute and he realized she was nearly full term. A physician arrived on scene and jumped in to the car with my friend. They proceeded to deliver a healthy but distressed 8 pound baby boy via emergency cesarean section. The child is about 21 now. I have many others but those are the ones I can remember.

nice poem Windsong. my tree didn't describe me but others did.

why is this in the funny stuff part. this was a neat story.

You know, I think we are all professional enough to know not to watch pron.(porn) You will have a hard time convincing anyone here or at any fire department or ems station that taking away the R rated movie channels is a good idea. Porn = well there should be direct personnel policies addressing this and infractions should be punished even if there is no female personnel at the station. I worked at a station once that had numerous x-rated movies in it's library but after a while they lost their appeal to the guys and they got rid of them. Jeesh, who the heck wants to watch a bunch of pornos with a bunch of guys. I sure don't. I say get rid of the porno if there is any but to take away the R rated movie channels I say no way. Heck, believe it or not, many of the R-rated movies you seem to be against are shown on other non r-rated channels with the nudity and curse words taken out. You can still see some offensive things on network or cable. Remember an episode of saved that I believe had the newbie medic watching two women make out in a car. I think I saw that on Saved. Not sure, I wasn't really watching but if that did happen on Saved then that could be considered in your statements to be a hostile workplace. I think there are a lot more issues out there that we can tackle in place of taking away the r-rated channels. If we take them away, you are going to have a lot of angry unionized fire fighters and medics. union or not, they will be angry.

They were kidding right, is it april fools day? Add beds in the ER, means construction and disruption of the ER. This has to be more than the cost of putting a patient in a bed. I don't see it. Plus, if you have more patients than beds all the time then if you add more beds then you just put those patients in the additional beds. So if there is still more patietns than beds then where is the benefit???

well my parents just had a car accident last weekend and the windshield was starred by the airbags. They watched the airbags deploy and they saw the windshield after the deployment and they said the airbags starred the windshield. I ended up on scene with them as a son not a medic. So I think that the starring of the windshield might not be tantamount to assuming that the patients head starred it. Some thing to think about. I would have never thought the airbag would star the window but now I know different.

I take a different slant on reporting. You find a format that works for you and never deviate from that format. If you consistently do it one way and never deviate from it you will become a very good report writer. It just takes time. Second, I had a book that told you how to write a legally defensible report. I cannot remember the book but it opened my eyes

Got a question for you guys. Witnessed a MVC, not a bad one but a mvc nonetheless tonight. Right in front of me. I stopped and got out to help. Minor injuries. Pt. had neck, back and chest pain but no other related injuries. EMS and Fire was called. On Fire's arrival I identified myself as a medic and gave them a report. They then took over. I then left. Was it wrong of me to leave??? I know that the law says that you turn over to the same level provider as yourself but I was not working, no equipment or anything. should I have left or waited for EMS??????

Drive fast, he he he that did go away with Mother Jugs and Speed. Maybe the more appropriate term would be emergent with all due caution. Do you drive fast with all patients or was that just a Homer Simpson Statement - DOH!

GAMEDIC Step away from the Kool aid get off your high horse and re-read the articles that I posted. Before you cast stones you had better be able to prove that for every overdose patient you have responded to that you have given charcoal to them. I bet you cannot say that. I for one can count on my right and left hand the number of times in the past 20 years that I have heard of Activated Charcoal given in the field. First off there are many many many if not every overdose that you run(some fit a single drug) overdose but a vast majority of overdoses fit the criteria of multiple med overdoses and many of those drugs that the patient has taken either are not affected by activated charcoal or the patient has called later than 3 hours. I have given AC maybe 5 times in my career in the ambulance and that was because we were greater than 20 minutes from the hospital. If the window is less than 3 hours than gastric lavage is indicated before charcoal. Even the poison control system in our area is advocating that if the overdose is greater than 3 hours hence then Activate will not do anything. Your stomach has emptied out anything you have taken within the last 3 hours and it has probably already gone thru the intestines too. If you can prove that you have given activated charcoal for every overdose you have taken care of in the ambulance then you can cast stones but until you can prove that you give charcoal to all your patients who fit the criteria then you have NO Place to criticize treatment.

Here are some articles on this. these give the full spectrum of activated charcoal administration One argues that activated charcoal should not be given routinely. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f...p;dopt=Citation http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f...p;dopt=Citation http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f...p;dopt=Citation http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/content/abstract/96/3/672 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.f...p;dopt=Citation http://www.springerlink.com/(20jidc3tb4ndf...ults,1:100413,1

two points to make No your mom cannot out drink my mom - NUff said and it was father mulcahy with Radar manning the radio. They did it on a guy on a stretcher on the jeep.(sounds like clue huh?) Peace out and whatever Mike

then the amount of ethylene glycol ingestion cases must be pretty high in the EMS community he he he

I was trying to be funny not sensitive. I have no problems posting these types of topics but as each and everyone of us knows here, that once one of those topics gets posted it invariably deteriorates down to a negative post. Someone in the past week or so posted that they were sick of the negative slants of many of the threads. The ones I listed are the ones that always become negative as well as many of them get nasty. Lots and lots of good points put in those posts but many negative posts too.

and lets not forget the use of nitrous oxide by people other than patients. I know for a fact that it was used by crewmembers at one ambulance system I worked for. Peace out

1. Fire versus EMS 2. What's wrong with this picture 3. Medics versus EMT's 4. Are you a wanker? 5. Recruitment threads 6. My dad can beat up your dad. I promise never to post a thread on any of the above topics. AS for reply to them, sure but never post them.

Yes in fact I have. We had a 3 year old who drank antifreeze out of a cup that her dad had poured. It smelled good and tasted sweet. She got a alcohol drip. The only things we were told to look out for was Deep Tendon Reflexes and LOC for the alcohol effects I got a excellent briefing on deep tendon reflexes and tested them throughout the transport. The little girl was an angel and the trip was really fun - 200 miles in the back of an ambulance. Thank god for inverters and TV/VCR combos.

Darn it guys, if we can have the televised world championship of Dominos then this running of the bulls should be considered a sport.

NAMed those nurses were giving you a load of crap. They are probably the first to stop a a car wreck and say "I'm and ER nurse" and then try to help you when they are truly out of their scope of practice. I believe cobra says that if the patient is on their hospital grounds then that patient is theirs. Our cobra investigator said to us one day that if we can see the patient even if he's 1 foot outside the hoispital property then he is our patient. The hospital that had it's nurses watch as a 14 year old bled out due to a gsw lost a huge lawsuit becuase they saw the patient yet failed to act. They said since he wasn't on their property that he was not their patient.

absolutely my friend. This was written in 1987 so I am sure a lot has changed but daily cost of living. That's classic. We can add drug use, suicide and just being near a bird for West Nile he he

EMS Helicopter crashes. This is a great article. Might just make us re-evaluate the general use of helicopters for transporting. This article has far reaching consequences and may lead to a revamping of when to call a helicopter. http://www.alea.org/public/safety/files/20...ident_Study.pdf