Just Plain Ruff

As long as the instructors stay current in their respective knowledge base then there in no reason for the instructor to be put out to pasture. If the instructor does not know the 12 lead then if they are worth their salt then they will bring in a instructor who knows 12 leads. If they are rusty on the new drugs then they learn them or they get a pharmacist to come in and teach the class. If the instructor is teaching 12 leads and they haven't ever used them, have not ever worked with the modality then they have no business teaching that part of the class. A good instructor will understand their limitations and adapt or they will bring in someone who can augment the info. My paramedic instructor was a paramedic out of the field for 10 years and a police officer and I consider him one of the best instructors I've ever had. He knew what he knew and what he didn't know he brought in someone who did. Someone with 25 years of experience has plenty to give to the students and the patient care scenarios should be worth the price of admission alone.

Yes, my gps devices are a map, a compass and a wife. Usually the wife is pretty spot on. Don't even think about asking for directions. Why spend 400 bucks on a garmin when you can have a priceless wife by your side.

Without knowing the dynamics behind this issue it's hard to discuss rationally. My opinion is this is what is happening. Something the student has done has made them treat them this way. Maybe it's not the student's fault but there are a myriad of reasons this might happen. appearance of the student Attitude of the student demeanor of the student reputation of the student Appearance - did they look groomed and professional in appearance Attitude - what was their initial attitude when they arrived for their ride? Was it gung ho or was it "I'm not checking the ambulance out" Demeanor of the student - goes directly to attitude also reputation of student - if the instructors are friends of the medics allowing the rides and they say, "this student's a tosser or someone who is not smart or what not" then they may not get a chance OR The medic's who are running the trucks are just Arseholes and don't want to do any work. Either or, sounds like your program is a crappy one. Is it too late to get into another class or program?

If you don't want them to become repetetive or redundant why don't you set yourself up a blog. You can set one up here.

Does anyone remember the car that Tony got Samantha in Who's the Boss??? Big, Yellow and decked out with 100 reflectors and lights. I have never understood the thought process of volunteers on this. you have your personal vehicle that you drive to work and around town. You now drive your personal vehicle to a scene and on the way you get in a wreck. You are running blue lights which on a very dark and dreary day someone might be able to see. I have seen blue lights running on dashboards of an el camino and I can swear that they are impossible to see in bright daylight. So you get in a wreck driving to the scene, you go through a red light and get hit. You now have caused a secondary incident that you have to staff too. After a while, you get a certified letter in the mail or better yet a process server giving you a piece of paper that you are being sued for injuries and pain and suffering you caused to the couple when you busted the red light. You go to the fire chief and plead your case to have them help you fight this lawsuit and they say they are not responsible for your actions and distance themselves from you. So now you have no support, no car and are gettin sued. I know this is overdramatic but this is exactly how it's going to play out. I would never consider driving my personal car to a fire scene as a volunteer which means I would never volunteer but the risks are just too great. It's hard enough to get the big trucks and ambulances to the scene in one piece these days let alone keeping track of all the vollies coming from all different directions to a scene. One of these days we are gonna read about a volunteer fireman driving his personal vehicle to a scene and getting creamed by the responding fire truck or ambulance. It's gonna happen, if not already happened, it's gonna.

http://www.news4jax.com/news/14150159/detail.html I didn't know sex could cause a SUV to get top heavy. Whatever.

let me put my 2 cents in on this diaper changing thing. for those of you who say you won't change a diaper why dont' you crap in your pants and leave it in there for 4 or so hours. See how uncomfortable you are. Jeesh, changing a diaper is nothing. If you refuse change a diaper then I have doubts about you.

Watch out chaser, dust and Chuck are on first name basis now.

Like I said before as long as you take what we tell you or say to you with the spirit that it's intended it's all good. I'm glad to hear that you are more conscious of your grammar and such on important things like pcr's and papers. That's a good thing. The offer of any help I can give is always there as well it's always available to anyone on this site other than Dustdevil, he's got my private line.

ok, great clarification. So did they tell you why you didn't make it to the next round? Or are you running blind on that? Sounds like you did a lot right. It's good that you had someone review the application for you. My suspicion is that you are too young for that service. My suspicion is that they need someone 21 or older to qualify under their insurance plan. You more than likely also lost out on the experience part. I am sure that there were more experienced people in the queue than you. Which not being experienced is not a crime but EMS agencies will take someone experienced over someone with scant experience(like yourself) every day of the week. This is a very good segue to going on and getting your paramedic. There is no negative effect of working at walmart or flipping burgers while getting your medic class taken care of as well as the other classes dust and myself have suggested. If I was in your situation, I would go full bore into paramedic class and get myself a paramedic certification or degree and then start your career afresh as a medic. You will find that being fresh out of medic school with no experience will help rather than hinder you in looking for a job because many services will hire a new grad because they have no bad habits to fix. They can train you to their way of doing things. I wish you the best in whatever you decide to do.

Heck yeah I use it all the time on my hot dogs.

Wendy I'm not sure I got your drift but maybe I did If I'm called to a emergency scene who am I to judge if it's an emergency or not. It's not your job to pass judgement on what is or what is not an emergency. It's your JOB to take care of the patient who stubbed their toe just as it is YOUR JOB to take care of the cardiac arrest. Just because it does not fall under "OUR" definition of an emergency does not mean it is not an emergency to them. People, until there are no ambulances on the streets and we can all trasport to sickbay like in star trek we have to do what we are getting paid (or not paid(volly)) to do and that is to respond to a patient in need, take care of them and then go get another patient. If you complain about doing the calls at 3am in the morning that's part of the job. If you don't like it then get out of EMS. I want someone who wants to work. You can bitch and moan about those early morning calls all you want but don't ever let the patient hear your displeasure. If you are on the ambulance with me and the patient hears you bitching cause they woke you up I can tell you I'm gonna be pissed and not want you as a partner.

You have promise my friend. You have yet to run off from the onslaught of dust and myself and others. Please keep your eye on the ultimate goal of paramedic. Dust and others have given exellent and truly valuable advice. If you paid for the advice you would have paid 19.95 on late night tv. Please keep the questions coming and don't let all of us run you off. Some of the most educated and skilled people in the entire field of EMS are on this site. Many with 20 or more years of experience in ems. Others with 10 or more years. We speak truth grasshopper.

ok, Yes there is truth behind it and NO there is no truth behind it. With that said here is my backing that above statement up. It depends on several factors. 1. Personal bias of the interviewer 2. Personal/professional bias of the company itself 3. Do they follow Affirmative action? 4. How well did you do in the interview or did you even get that far. I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute. 5. How you looked 6. The personal opinions of the interviewer(did they like you or not) Number 4 explained What did your application look like? Were there mis-spellings? Was your grammar correct? What did your resume look like? Was there gross grammatical and spelling errors. Unfortunately like someone else as well as I posted on one of your previous threads, your grammar and spelling here is atrocious. Punctuation and spelling is basically non-existent. If I was a hiring manager or in the hiring process and your resume and application were written like you are writing on your posts here I'd put your application and resume in the circular file. I may give you an interview but you are not going to be on the top of my list. I've been in the hiring process before and you would not believe the damage some job seekers do to themselves when they cannot spell simple words and cannot form coherent or grammatically correct sentences. It then directly shows in their speaking and the way they talk. I'm sincerely hoping that you really work on your grammar and spell check every post and have someone review your resume. This site is a great site for help and we honestly do want what's best for you but you are your own worst enemy. I've edited several people's resume's for them on this site and others and I'd be happy to do the same for you. I know what EMS employers are looking for and what they are not looking for. Feel free to take me up on my offer.

Dust, You've done a masterful job of spelling it out for this person. I think you might be banging your head against a brick wall though. Listen to Dust, he's spot on. If you don't , you only have yourself to blame. The experience you get from 2 calls a week is nothing. You should be working towards getting a good education. If like you say the tones get you off then you should be right there with the level of excitement of your other vollies. Get out of that situation and get some schooling. Unfortunately, after my earlier post I think this person needs more than two semester's of English Comp. Not to be critical(ok I will actually) if you are writing reports and your grammar and spelling is as bad on your patient care reports as it is here then you are in trouble. Please don't give me the old standby excuse that I type differently on the internet than I do on the Patient care reports. That's a lame excuse. There is such a thing as spellcheck. I am just as bad as many on the internet but I try to compose a decently worded reply or post.

Spenac, well said. I would offer her this piece of advice which will help her immensely in her report writing of which I used to be called the chart nazi. Take at least 1 or better yet, 2 semesters of english composition. She's young and inexperienced and her high school probably prepped her in English about as good as they prep anyone but taking two semesters of English composition would benefit her extremely well. I'm not knocking her posting because, even with the misspellings and the grammatical errors that I saw, I was able to clearly read what she was trying to say. One other thing would be for her to take the person aside that jumps in on her call and ask them why they jumped in. She might be surprised in their reasons or maybe not, who knows. But I know that when I was in her shoes, I felt that others jumped in and took over and after taking the time to ask them, I was surprised by their answers. Anyhow, good luck and keep the posts here coming. We aren't really all a-holes here. Many of us(the vast majority) are here to help you get more experience and a better handle on the calls that every one have been exposed to. And my most hated calls Spenac, are the ER to Nursing home calls at 3am. Why can't they just hold them till the next shift comes on????

every service I've worked for has had Fire do the extrication and rescue. Some FD's were expertly trained and worked flawlessly but others were like the keystone firejockeys. One memorable scene was an entrapment of a patient in an mva. On fires arrival they brought out their shiny extrication tools which were in layman's terms, manual cutters and jaws. They started to operate them and every time they started to spread some hydraulic fluid leaked out. Unfortunately I was in the car with the patient and I got the hydraulic fluid on me. I at the time did not know what the liquid was that was dripping on my back and scalp but I got the picture pretty quick. (OUCH if you get my drift) The fire department on scene would not call for assistance from a neighboring scene and after some yelling at the captain and fire crews we got them to call the neighboring department which took 35 minutes to get to us. Meanwhile the patient is crashing and I have no way of getting him out since his lower legs are crushed under the car and the pavement. Finally the real firemen get there and within 8 minutes the patient is out, loaded on the helicopter and en route to the trauma center. I am now enroute to my local hospital to be treated for minor burns and chemical exposure. what a night.

I believe Mr. Dust said it best.

good luck on this weeks class. One good book to get for anatomy is the anatomy coloring book. Teaches you a lot. Other books are out there but the above book is pretty good to learn anatomy. ONe thing you posted earlier was something about 850 bucks. You mean that if you volunteer you get the 850 dollars waived? If that's the case then it sounds like you are paying for everyones class since they are all volunteers. Tell that person who told you that career was a crapshoot to shut his mouth. I don't see anyone making any money volunteering. Kind of hard to support a family on a volunteers wages.

ok, is anyone else getting a popup warning you that there is objectionable humor? I think its sort of annoying but it serves a purpose.

Dear editor I was pointed to the letter criticizing the paramedics who waited a distance away for the police to arrive. In EMT school all the way up to paramedic school we as medical providers are taught over and over again that if there is violence involved they are not to enter the scene. It sounds like these medics or EMT's and Medics took that training to heart. What surprises me is that the Edmonton fire department does not apparantly teach that to their hero fire fighters. What would have happened to the firefighters had the assailant who stabbed that person still been on the scene. They could have been stabbed or even worse, killed. We in the EMS community go by this mantra, a dead hero is still a dead hero. They cannot help the patient if they have been injured. If a provider is injured providing assistance to a patient then they become part of the incident and more resources are needed to work a given scene thereby taking resources away from a citizen of the community. I don't ever want to hear of another EMS provider being injured but unfortunately that is a risk that we are all willing to take. It seems that the fire department seems to either not take scene safety seriously or they want to take more risks than others. Thank you

i agree with the protocols and such but should we be trusting a medication like Nitro to be given by an emt with no ability to reverse or fix what sometimes can be a disastrous result. How many medics on this site have given nitro and the patients BP bottomed out? I'd be interested in how often this really happens. 120 hours barely scratches the surface and we are giving them the ability to help admin a medication like this one.

Actually what I was commenting to was you saying that a patient just cannot come out and say they do not want to be resuscitated that it has to be signed by a doc. I say that they can. If a patient tells me they do not want to be resuscitated and they do that in direct terms, then they go ahead and die on ya, do you resuscitate them or not? I for one am going to be calling my medical control and discussing this with them. What do you do?

Ok here is what I don't understand. EMT-B's can assist with giving Nitro to a patient with chest pain if it is the patients own medication. Does anyone else see a problem with that? As a medic, I never ever ever give a nitro without an IV established. Why would we give the ability to give a medication that if you ask the majority of medics on the City if they would give Nitro to a patient without having an IV present and they would say, NOPE wouldn't do it. So we give a medication that potentially has the ability to drop a blood pressure, in the extreme to bottom it out, and we give this ability to a EMT with 120 hours of training but no ability to establish an IV. Does anyone else see a problem with this?

More than likely they initially used cooling blankets to cool this guy down. Not sure what medication you would use to cool someone down. I don't know of any that are out there. Hypothermia is going to be the next big thing in ROSC for cardiac arrest. As a matter of fact there will be an article in one of the upcoming Fieldmedics magazine issues. Probably the January issue.