xselerate

I don't really get excited about stoping to help off duty... I mostly feel like I don't belong... like some rookie buff... cause that's what I think of people that stop to help me when I'm working.

I find it hard to connect to this topic. We don't give blood in the field, period. I have had family members of pediatrics and non-alert adults try to prevent care or transport and it's always just been a simple matter of calling for PD and a supervisor. Family will either have to step back or be forced back by PD. And while there is the likelihood that injuries requiring life saving transfusions may be terminal anyway, we must accept the reality that putting something in someone's veins that can carry oxygen saves lives... so I wonder if their are any endeavors by this particular religious community to finance research into blood-alternatives. I'am certainly not up on such research, but I think if we stocked 1 liter bags of saline/synthetic hemoglobin mix I would have heard something.

I had one. http://www.silive.com/news/index.ssf/2007/...ws_of_vici.html

a funny fdny ems story... fdny last year issued everyone new id cards with microchips and bio-security crap (fingerprint) in them... someone got the idea to field test a new system in one of the stations in which everyone would use their id card to enter the station and medics would also use their card to open the narc box... someone screwed something up and the narc box would pop open when someone tried to get in the front door.... whoops needless to say the system went away... it is only a story... who knows how true lol

kinda funny but i had almost the same job... only we found the guy with the top of his head on the ground and his body stooped over as if he had been walking, put his chin to his chest and fell straight down onto the top of his head. we gave each other the bullsomthin look and walk over to this guy at which point we tell him to get up and offer a small nudge to his leg. when he didn't move i supported his neck and we turned him around and supine onto the ground. he was cyanotic to his entire face with severely poor capillary refill to his chest... i know that sounds weird but i don't know how else to describe it. if i pushed down on his chest softly with my hand it left a pale area the shape of my hand that took approx 6 secs to return to color. oh... and he reeked of alcohol. we immediately called for als back, immobilized for the odd position we found, striped him to check for unknown injuries/illnesses and began ventilating. medics showed up and continued ventilating for a few minutes before his resps became more normal and we switched to a nrb. he was able to answer yes and no questions by the time we got to the er... still can't figure out what the hell was going on with him...

nothing personal but... also you might find the tv show "house" interesting... tuesday night on fox

haha my god this is hilarious... i had to stop reading here...

of coarse they get immobilized... they just get longboarded... no point in anything else really...

we sound like the only service that carries 2 keds and a short board... the short board comes in great to write on during transit but it's easier for us to have that sort of thing cause we're a large service and order large quantities of things like ssid's.... i don't think i've ever even seen a short board used... and as for the keds... well i've more often seen the words "found ambulatory prior to ems arrival" then i've ever seen a ked used... i wonder what kind of heated emotions about proper patient care that will illicit lol

god... so many people will probably hate me for this... and i really don't care... and i honestly havn't followed this discussion completly through... but i did see hatzolah mentioned and that was enough to irritate me... god i hate them so much... they are so arrogant and self righteous... i work a municipal unit (thats fdny not ny community hosp) in a very jewish neighborhood near kings hw/nostrand in brooklyn and god i havnt gotten through one job without fighting with hatzolah over their ridiculous ethnocentric ideals.

You should never have this problem because every job you do should be well documented on a PCR. Good documentation should allow you to be able to give an acurate testimony without looking like you screwed anything up. And your company had better find it... I would be pretty pissed at them if I were you. Although I will admit there isn't much they can ask you about if your company lost the PCR... it's not your responsability to remember things that happend years ago or to keep copies of reports.

i don't mind billing people... funny enough but i coulda sworn i had a job cause of them....

more then you or i could afford... we're not out to get rich in this career

i agree with noah... as an ems provider it is your job to be part detective in figuring out what is wrong with your patient. drugs on the scene is most definitely part of your history. it's your responsibility to your patient to get him the best care and a thorough history is a good way to do it.

okay, perhaps i was not completely clear... i have seen cops and firefighters get more respect then ems.... just look at the benefits they get that ems doesn't, at least in NY. i'm sorry but cops and firefighters, regardless of their abilities, do get looked upon as more professional then us. and if you don't believe that... well perhaps you would be interested in a bridge in brooklyn that i have for sale. my previous points were general and meant for anyone interested. if you have a legitimate problem with any i would be happy to discuss them, that's the whole point of this. and he will start working. furthermore i went on to explain why i reacted so harshly and that i wasn't specifically attacking him but rather the image he portrayed for ems. i even went on to offer friendly advice and wish him luck so how am i attacking him? i try not to get into heated debates but this happens to be an issue very close to my heart. i just want us all to look professional so that we will be treated as such. please understand that i don't want to jump on anyone.

It doesn't matter if he is or isn't yet, he will be if that's what he wants to do. And it may be easy for you to calm down... I'm not sure of what your views are on the image of EMS as professionals but it is an issue important to me and if I can help it I will. I don't think I'm advocating anything that many others would disagree with.

I think I may have been adventurous with you... if you seriously thought heat was being trapped then your first treatment of a burn should be to stop the burning process... but I can understand your partner's concerns...

Whoa Juilin... this strikes me as something to touch on. ABCs are your initial assessment but used to be called the primary survey due to there importance. Some important things can be missed by a "quick glance". It's important to listen to lung sounds, you never know what you will find. It's also important to check the rate and quality of your patients pulse as well as their skin color, temperature and condition in the C step. This can tell you an entire textbook worth of information... shock (I'm not talking about hypovolemia... EMTs equate shock with hypovolemia too often... their are many types of shock including septic i.e. warm skin), cardie history and/or acute cardiac events (dysrytmias i.e. a fib, a flutter or worse) clued in to you just by checking a pulse and skin condition. Good luck in the field!

Try to understand longs... I didn't try to attack you personally. In my experience their is sometimes an attitude that EMS is not made up of professionals... that we run lights/sirens to get dinner and the like. Things that make us look anything but explicitly professional upset me to no end. We all have to fight for better contracts, better wages, respect, etc etc. When I see an EMS professional who appears unwilling to take the time to read through their protocols or contact their local regional medical council it makes me wonder why I strive constantly to do my job as professionally as humanly possible. I hope you take the time to read through your protocols and commit them to memory. If you can't find your answer there then contact your department of health or local medical council. But it is important if you plan on remaining in this profession to carry out everything you do with great pride and professionalism. And if you plan on raising a family on the job well.... first of all good luck.... second of all study your stuff and become the most educated EMT possible, then go become a Medic because your not raising a kid on a basic's salary. Just remember... you don't see police officers that don't know when to arrest people... you don't see fire fighters that don't know how to fight fire... we're professionals and, unfortunately, we sometimes have to prove it to the communities we serve.

My protocols require moist sterile dressings to no more then 20% of the body at one time... dry sterile dressings go over that... On a completly different and undiscussed note... How about beating the guy over his head that put burn cream on a second degree burn?

The second is obviously an ALS job, but the first is just a trauma, no need for ALS that I can think of... No unmanageable airway, no need for needle decompression... all that needs to be done is immobilize and monitor for signs of shock, in which case you treat for shock, and signs of rising inter-cranial pressure, in which you can hyperventilate... either way they need a surgeon, not a medic. I second that.... that's the big difference in peds.... they compensate, compensate, compensate, boom their dead.

Shouldn't he have just done CPR untill an ambulance arrived, then they would have taken over CPR and patient care. The patient would have either been pronounced by medics or transported and it wouldn't have been his responsability anymore. Seems simple enough to me...

which means your either a medic or a medic student in which case i would hope that all medic students get signs / symptoms, medications, and pathophysiology beaten into them with a big ass mother f'in stick!

If someone needs to come to an internet discussion board to find out about what they can do according to their own protocols then I worry that maybe, just maybe, that person should seriously not be an EMT. Good God... even if you got an answer to a question like that here are you seriously going to trust what a complete stranger says on the internet about your protocols??? Let's just suppose, hypothetically speaking, that you couldn't do finger sticks and someone here told you that you could. When questioned in court and you say "well the guy on the internet said I could do it" what do you think is going to happen?? I still can't believe that someone could be so lazy and/or dumb to look at their own damn protocols!

Here is what they teach us in NYC. We are taught to the awareness level for haz mat (homeland security just gave cash for us all to be trianed to operations level this year).... once you believe that the job may be a haz mat job, roll down your window just a little bit so that you can yell out to find out whats happening. Do this as your partner puts the bus in reverse and drives away. scene safety in the order of me, we, them (we being your partner).