HarryM

They would. But the service would refuse to back them up and say that the driver was well aware of the 30km/h max overspeed limit in place. I've heard of such cases happening and the driver ended up paying the fine. Whether that was through being ordered by the court or just if they paid it to not go through the fuss of legal proceedings I can't be sure.

Obvious was probably not the right word to use. Without having extra history I would assume that the arrest is secondary to trauma, and treat as such. As I did mention in my first post, there is of course a (quite high) possibility that the arrest was a primary one in which case seeing as the patient is in PEA the survival rate is again very low and I would stop efforts after about 10min. I'm only BLS trained at the moment, so this would be on the proviso that I was making the call. If I was with an ILS/ALS person then obviously they would make the call as they have the ability to administer drugs and other interventions that I don't.

I should have been more precise. The law only applies during Priority 1 responses (lights and sirens) and states that drivers have a defence, rather than a blanket exemption. All ambulances caught by speed cameras are issued with fines, which get sent to the ambulance service to which the vehicle is registered. That ambulance service then checks whether the vehicle was on a P1 response, and if so the service then sends a letter to the Police Infringement Department (or whatever the name is) advising them of this and the fine is dropped. However, if the fine is for a speed which exceeds the speed limit by more than 30km/h then the service will find out who was driving and forward the fine to them and the service will refuse to apply for the fine to be dropped under the internal policy of not exceeding the speed limit by 30km/h.

I'm a BLS and have the following options: Entonox Paracetamol Methoxyflurane In our service ILS gets morphine and ALS gets ketamine and midazolam added onto that.

In New Zealand, our laws state that emergency service vehicles are exempt speed limits (ie: they can go any speed). Most services however, have a policy stating that drivers can not exceed the speed limit by more than 30km/h. This means that if the ambulance is snapped by a speed camera and is going over 30km/h then the driver gets sent the fine.

From my training, I wouldn't try to resuscitate the patient. Firstly, it is obvious the cardiac arrest was secondary to some sort of other massive injury sustained from the accident, which means that he has almost no chance of living unless you can fix the injury that caused the arrest. If, for some reason, the patient had a cardiac arrest and THEN crashed I would still not resuscitate for very long. The patient is in PEA (which has a very poor survival rate). I would ascertain from the bystanders what happened (attempting resus while doing so), see the pt was in PEA and then stop resuscitation efforts if there was no ROSC within 10min. After deciding to stop resus then hand over pt to Police on the scene to deal with.