Dustdevil

Opps; I that should read I have wind!

Is that your cute way of saying you're not going to tell us where you are? :?

If you're going to go on and on about how things are where you are, it would be polite to at least tell us where that might be.

Squint, exactly what province is "the wind" in?

Basically, the question should be, "Why are we allowing inepts to drive over their heads, in porker vehicles never intended to go more than 50, just because they have a siren/yelp/wail/airhorn knob on the console?"

Bravo! =D>

But we'll get to answering your question only after somebody tells me why we're allowing immature illiterates to practice emergency medicine with less than a college education.

For an assist I've always had great luck with the FD's in my area, especially when I ran on w/ a rural EMS outfit.. they were always helpful and knowledgeable.

Other than a very few bad experiences ( to be expected over thirty years ), I too have always had good luck with FD first responders. I am only saying that if I had my druthers, I would rather simply have more medics to help me. So long as FD's run first response, they are used by the bean counters as an excuse to not fund EMS adequately. I would like to see that change.

Okay, that sounds good. If it is a call where a first responder or assist crew is needed, I would certainly rather it be another ambo than a fire crew.

Any chance your fire chief will come talk to mine?

Ditto what Rid said in his last two posts. Thanks for saving me the time, Rid!

What happened to "Emergency" (aka. Emergency Product News) magazine anyhow? Did it die with DynaMed? It was a great mag in its day. But of course, it was about 75 percent an advertisement for DynaMed. But at least it got the ball started.

What no takers....comments, or anything relating to this....topic?!!?!?!? :roll: :idea:

Sorry... I'm still distracted, trying to figure out why you keep sticking the "@" sign everywhere. :?

That is way to many emergency vehicles on the road at once headed to the same location.

Two is too many? Or do you mean two plus a fire engine is too many?

The only one I still receive is "Military Medicine." It's a great read, and isn't all about battle trauma as the name might imply to some. It covers a broad spectrum of medical topics. Once I get back to the field, I intend to subscribe to JTrauma, EN, and some others. Most agencies I have worked have JEMS and EMS laying around the office or station, so there is no need to subscribe.

I call JEMS & EMS toilet reading material, very simple and non-scientific. Basically a review of what you should had known already and if you read true Journals you would had already known this informatiop 2-3 years before their publication. ...<snip>... I wished EMS had a a true Journal such as Emergency Nursing from ENA. They have at least abstract papers and researc articles, something we should learn from.

I share your vision, Bro. I truly do. But I am realistic about the motivation and intellect of the average medic in this country too. The high-end education for our field is an Associates degree. And those who hold it are resented by the tech-school medics because "all that book learnin' don't make you start IVs better than me!" :roll:

Until the educational dilemma in EMS is solved, I'm afraid I don't see any financial incentive for anyone to publish a truly scientific EMS journal. Not enough people to buy it. For that matter, not enough medics doing research to fill it. Consequently, for the forseeably distant future, we're stuck with the entertainment mags like JEMS, and the intellectual medics will simply have to continue to leech off of the medical and nursing journals for worthwhile science.

Not sure I'm going to be around in March, but I'd sure like to go.

Randy Mantooth is going to be there!!! =D>

For any of you who have not been to an EMS Today conference, I HIGHLY recommend it. They are excellent. You get a bunch of CE hours out of it. The exhibit hall itself is darn near worth the price of the conference, as you will pick up a lot of great info there and see new products that your agency is too cheap to buy. And if you are smart, you'll do some networking and meet a lot of people whom it will be beneficial to know in the future. Not to mention, you'll just meet a lot of fun people and have a great time.

Of course, Baltimore sucks. I'd much rather be on the beach somewhere, or Orlando or San Antonio maybe. But I guess it beats Detroit or Terre Haute.

Sweet! I was assuming it was a normal system with too few ambulances to serve the population.

I would love to work in a system that could send another ambo as my backup instead of a fire engine!

But hold it, you're talking about sending another ambo AND a fire engine?

Are the ambos tiered, or all ALS? This is interesting.

I worked for a service that would triage the call. If it was an emergency call but not determined a lifethreat, (eg chest pain, ejection, long fall, cardiac arrest etc etc etc) the closest unit would respond L&S and the farther unit would go non-emergency. Usually the differences in response times would be no more than 2-4 minutes. If the first in unit determined that it was a non-emergent patient then they would say continue non-emerg but if they needed us to upgrade we always could. I found that to be a great idea.

What exactly is great about it? Why would any of those patients need four medics and two ambulances? :?

Usually that is the case, you are dispatched to one thing; turns out to be another thing. People and even dispatch don't always know what is going on.

That sounds like a good study topic right there.

Here's your answer:

You don't know until you get there. And trying to assess your patient before you even get to his side is tantamount to malpractice. That's why most doctors will tell you, "I don't practice phone medicine." We shouldn't either.

Why rush to a scene to just sit there?

Yeah, what possible good could come from instituting patient care earlier?

that was just my point. It should be up to the individual driver as to whether they run lights and sirens. I don't need the local police or definitely don't need dispatch telling me how to run.

Hehe, what a coincidence. That's exactly my position on entering potentially violent scenes too!

it is worth it and i will continue to do it when my partner or I feel the patient is in need of it.

Especially if the caller requests that we do not!

And just for the record...some of our medics have been around since we WERE just ambulance drivers...those guys, and the ones who only passed cuz they're book smart, but can't lift or take a set of vitals to save their lives...do they deserve to be called paramedics?

Hmmm... that's a different take. In my experience coming up from the funeral home ambulance days of the early 1970's, damn few of those guys I worked with made the transition to EMS. Once FR or EMT was officially required, the educational process washed most of them out. They didn't have book smarts. They didn't have any smarts at all! Certainly not enough to become a paramedic.

A few of them did make it though. One of them was a young rookie named Bryan Bledsoe. You know him as Dr. B.E. Bledsoe, the guy who wrote your paramedic textbook.

Unfortunately, I've had way more than my fair share of serious injuries in my lifetime. Consequently, I have had the opportunity to experience just about all of the known analgesics at one time or another. Trust me, I'm not bragging. :?

But interestingly enough, the most absolutely whacked out of mind I have ever been was on the non-narcotic synthetics. Stadol and Ultram are highly hallucinogenic! I really don't remember if they actually killed the pain or not. All I remember is that I simply didn't care if I was hurting anymore.

None of that is nearly as much fun as Demerol.

I'm not so sure how common it is, but it is certainly normal. Different people react to different stimulus. Apparently you respond well to reality based stimulus, and not so well to theoretical stimulus. Nothing wrong with that. It will serve you well in the field.

Just to compare this to another common situation, there are many people (myself included) who do poorly with theoretical mathematics. The professor has not been born who can teach me college algebra with any level of understanding. Yet in the real world, many of those people excel at mathematical problem solving. For instance, although I do horrible in mathematics classes, I am the nurse that all the other nurses come to to work out their drug calculations for them. And all those other nurses made A's in college algebra.

So long as you are doing well in the field, and as long as your preceptors are recognizing that, I would not worry too much about it. However, it is certainly something that you will want to work on in order to further your career. A public speaking or communications class may prove helpful to you. It doesn't seem to be so much of a knowledge problem as it is the ability to quickly compose and express yourself in formal situations where you are on the spot. Someday you will be the preceptor, and the ability to one-on-one with your students and recognize when they have similar problems will be invaluable to you.

Good luck.

But here in Ontario at least... even that person driving the ambulance is a Paramedic, not just a driver. Anyone with the right license can be an ambulance driver, but it takes at least two challenging years of school to become a Paramedic.

That's the crux of the problem, right there. Here, an EMT is anywhere from 14 days to three months of part-time night school to learn nothing but advanced first aid. And then they want to put on patches and badges, a stethoscope around their neck, puff out their chest and proclaim themselves to suddenly be a healthcare professional. I ain't buying it. The medical and nursing profession ain't buying it. And the public ain't buying it either.

I'm going to warn my little sister to never go into EMS.

Was driven to the ED last night by my partner with the worst migraine I have ever had in my entire life. I have never vomited with a migraine - until last night.

Be careful to not overlook any signs that you may be burning out. Seriously. If you have never had migraines like that before, then this could be a sign of burnout. I remember when I burned out the first time (14 years into the field) I had migraines so bad that I had to have my partner drive the entire shift while I sat or laid in back with the lights out because the light made me throw up. Couldn't concentrate. Skills were suffering. A couple weeks off is all it took and I was fine. Never another headache.

I'm just sayin... be careful.

Dude, that ER sucks! I would never go back there.

I sprained my ankle on the job once. Got taken to the hospital in my own ambulance, and wheeled into the ER by my own partner on my own cot. I thought for sure it was fractured, but it was just a major sprain. That didn't stop them from giving me Demerol/Vistaril and a script for Vicodin. And I am sure your finger hurt at least as much as my ankle did. That's just wrong.