He says he's been on an ambulance for a year before this. He's fine with the paperwork and writes a good narrative so maybe he did. Everything else is not so good, though. We had a busy day today for the most part. We had maybe two hours of downtime on the 12 hour shift, and he didn't seem to take advantage of it when we had it and he wanted a cigarette every time we stopped the rig.
He was supposed to be in training with myself and my partner for the day. I've never pulled a shift with either one and have about the same amount of time in the field that he does. Maybe a little more but I'm not going to pull out a calendar and start counting shifts. It's close.
We don't have a lot of Leaders at this company so I wasn't totally familiar with the rig. The gloves are in a different box, the blue sheets are in the door not on the shelf, etc. If he wasn't familiar with the rig then neither was I. We use a different gurney than he's used to so I'll give him that, but the guy never went ahead and got the door for us. I had to go get signatures a couple of times. He was sitting in the dialysis chairs. While that's not a problem or anything, I've just never seen an EMT sit in the dialysis chairs. Everybody I know either does their paperwork on the rig or standing in a corner with the clipboard or something. Usually those places are busy and they don't have open chairs anywhere. He didn't want to reach past the patient to get the large BP cuff. He looked at me and expected me to get it for him. It was just kind of off all day. He was supposed to be getting checked off today for patient care, so the expectation was that he was going to handle that work today and show that he knows what he's doing.
I'm sure he knows, he just wasn't showing any hustle. He beat me to it a whopping four times today. Got one door, loaded the gurney once, and I can't remember the others. He was on the phone or texting a lot of the time. I don't care if he does, it's no big deal to me. But when it's time to bring the patient in or out, hang up the phone and do your job. Don't leave the patient or your partner waiting for you to finish your personal business on the clock. I know we all do it from time to time, but it was pretty apparent that he had better things to do today than do his job.
At the end of the day, he was cleaning up his paperwork and asked me if I was going to "stick him with all the work."
Bottom line, I'm going to ask management to not put me on with this guy. I thought maybe it was me, maybe I was expecting too much or something, but the FTO thought the same thing. He didn't want to check him off for patient care today because he didn't see much of it.