subliminal

Vent, my advice to you is to go and volunteer time at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. You will then have actual experience and will see that 90% of these people just want a hand out not a hand up. They have no desire to get better at all.

Would you treat a patient if the patient refused to let you attend to their injuries? I sure hope not. It is the same principal if they dont want help you cant give it to them. No amount of you being there for them is going to make them open up their eyes and realize the self destructive path they are on and make them want to change.

Again and again and again.... Do you not understand the concept of team or how a healthcare system works? How many times do I have to explain it to you? Have you not even been part of a trauma system and know what goes into it.

I take it you are asking for a recipe. Sorry, but we go by guidelines and use the form most appropriate for the situation and the patient. If it is elder or child abuse, we have our pathway for that with the necessary reporting forms. I would hope your state and agency have at the very least told you about what the mandates are. We take special care to document homelessness when it involves children and the elderly. Each area will usually have special programs for people that fall into this category especially if they are homeless for one of the reasons outlines within state laws. For repeat offenders, we track with the hospital systems by documenting "homeless" or "Social Service request" and filling out a separate brief information form. Honestly it is not that big of a deal to go out of your way to help someone or to start a paper trail to get someone who pisses you off by repeat calls locked up. You don't need to get any special book learnin' to do it or one of them college degrees.

Don't play dumb (unless your really are and then you have my apologies) when this is a relatively simple concept but it seems there are those in EMS like yourself that choose not to get involved. Do you really have to be spoon fed everything or are you really just uninformed by choice?

Vent perhaps you are in the wrong field, maybe you should go be a become a social worker.

Im not running away, and I am on emtlife.com also. Its just pointless to argue over the internet. Neither one of us are going to change each others minds so like I said we will just agree to disagree

Think its time for this thread to be locked.

I digress im done with this thread and there is no point in arguing we will just have to agree to disagree vent.

To put it in perspective the local taco bell here now starts people off at $9.00 an hour........

So you are now stereotyping all homeless people and were you one that made the choice to be there? If you yourself was on the street, you should have a little understanding of the type of people living there. And, you should also take another look at who is out there. Of course, if your reason for being on the street is personal, you don't have to explain on an open forum. You may have been with a different crowd in a different environment and didn't have or at that time wasn't aware of the issues. And, if you did make the choice to live on the streets, it doesn't mean everyone has. Those with substance abuse and mental issues are not really able to make rational choices.

I guess it is attitudes like this is why some overlooked an elderly person lying in a ditch for 10 days in California and just made assumptions that it was his choice.

Funny you should mention Lee County. I hope you are not putting them into the same class of burnt out EMS providers as yourself and Herbie. Look at how they have hooked up with other services do make a difference.

No it was not my choice to be there I was there there due to financial reasons, and because of that I took steps to get myself out of that situation which didnt take long I might add. I dont mean to argue with you but it is true that the majority of people on the streets are alcholics and or drug addicts and have no desire to change. No amount of help is going to do them any good at all until they themselves get to the point to admit they have a problem and want to change. Ask any addiction recovery worker the first step to recovery is you have to admit you have a problem. All the help alot of them want from you is for you to give them money so they can buy another beer or buy their next fix.

Its sad I know but all you can really do is point them in the right direction to where they can get help, the rest is up to them. Subtance abuse, mental issues or not if they dont want help you cant give it to them. By the way are you in Lee County right now? If so are you working for Lee County EMS?

Coming from someone who has been on the street myself I can assure you MOST of the people on the street are there by their own choice and actions. The normal people who have a bit of bad luck and are put out on the street seek help and their situation is usually temporary, the bums and drug addicts out on the street have no desire whatsoever to change.

When I was younger my dad volunteered at a homeless shelter in Lee County Florida which I was with him there quite often. So needless to say I have plenty of experience with these types of people.

Its just like that old saying "You can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink"

Save the "education" speech- I'm a lifelong learner. I've been taking and teaching classes my entire adult life.

It's not about paper work or not wanting to get involved, it's about time management, and proper utilization of resources. In a busy urban system, crews may essentially run back to back calls their entire 24 hour shift. Tell me how much time should we take ensuring the proper social service agencies are notified, a case manager is assigned, a therapist is notified, etc? Every time I have initiated these contacts- mainly for issues of elderly abuse and/or neglect, after countless phone calls, and a couple hours, in the end, the person and/or their family are still the ones who need to follow up and seek this help. They need to make and keep the appointment, and unless you suggest we also drive someone to their AA meetings or housing assistance agencies, how far should we take this?

I don't know about your area, but our system cannot afford to have units and personnel tied up for that length of time. We have very strict turn around time limits because there is usually another call waiting. We need to justify any delay in returning the unit to service.

I'm sorry, but this is like triage. We can spend hours on personally obtaining social services for one person or we can notify the MANY TRAINED people who do this for a living all day, every day, and have all the necessary contact information at their fingertips. I have a hard time justifying playing social worker for 2 hours when we could be helping a couple people who need the skills we have been trained to use. If a department wants to assign a social service liaison whose only job is to track the homeless and frequent flyers, that's fine. I suggest it is an inappropriate use of your street assets to have them playing social worker, and most organizations would have a hard time selling that idea to their bean counters. If a unit is tied up, another one must cover their area, which delays the response, the snowball effect ensues, and it may take hours before the system recover.

Again, if you want to be a social worker, change careers. We should do what we can- within reason.

Sorry, I'm being honest.

Hit the nail on the head.

Have you even bothered to read any of the posts by myself or docharris? If you did you would have seen how and where EMS providers fit in.

You believe that the EMS provider can do nothing more than provide a ride to the hospital but fail to see where you could make even a slight difference without even getting anymore of that awful education stuff.

Since you also brought al of this up, let me give you more examples and you may even be who I am talking about.

Even though it is mandatory in all states to report elder and child abuse, many in EMS believe they just need to drop the patient off at the ED and say, "I think this person is living in an abusive enviroment" and then leave. The EMS providers believe the RNs will notify Case Managers and the State agency as well as filling out the report. The problem is they may not have witnessed what those in EMS saw. Yet, those in EMS believe "it's not my job", "I just bring them to the hospital", "I don't want to get involved", "It means more paper work".

I

Its been my experience that 9 times out of 10 homeless people are in the positions they are in because it is their own choice, No amount of assistance is going to help them until if and when they themselves ever decide to change. You could walk up to one and give them enough money to live off of for a few years and they would be in the exact same spot tomorrow. I have no sympathy whatsoever for those types of people. It is not our job as EMS providers to save them from themselves. Just treat them as you would any other patient

So pretty much AMR is the Wal Mart of the EMS world.