temsp40

I have triaged all your patients, and I am wondering what your criteria for triage is, are you working on the "phenomenom" of SMART triage the the military and several other states are using, or are you planning on utilizing some other triage standard. Based on your scenario, the first patient is deemed yellow because of the inability to ambulate. The second patient is green, although she is an OB patient and the final patient begins as red, but my guess is this patient will rapidly deteriorate to a black category. These determinations are made upon initial triage and will be further triaged when they arrive at the treatment areas. I am a Paramedic in MA.

"I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you...we are in charge of our attitudes." --Charles Swindoll

Why am I still in EMS? Probably because I am a glutton for punishment..... Actually, it is because I really enjoy my job, I like being a paramedic and I can't imagine doing any other job. I actually left a pretty decent paying job in a truck repair shop (yes, one of the companies that makes those great big am-bu-la-sauruses) because I REALLY hated my job. 14 years of EMS and still loving it..... P40

been there, done that and it was all my partners faulty

-paresis -- weakness or inability to move wpw

Unfortunately you didn't give the option of "Which One?" followed by the same options. Although most of my answers would have been either "rig" or "truck", I do work on a couple of them that fall in the "giant piece of expletive" category

Damned Canadian drugs! I bet it costs less too! :mrgreen:

??? ANYONE????

NI!

poor .....oh yeah, that's EMS!

don't forget -- equipment. 1. All gear bags shall be replaced with brand new at the start of every call. 2. If you are a paramedic, you will be issued a brand new monitor/defibullator/pacer/microwave/satellite communications/cool looking thingy every shift. 3. Your ambulance will be washed by the little gnomes kept in the outside compartment after every run so that it never looks like you have been running non-stop from one end of the world to the other. Runs 1. We never have to go for the "my tooth hurts" and explain to the patient that most ED's do not have a dentist on staff. 2. We never get the call for the "code brown" and the staff just can't handle it. 3. All patients for all runs will be located either (a) on the first floor with plenty of room to get the rack in or ( near the elevator (which is plenty large enough to accomodate your cot, your partner and all your new gear) so as to aid with extrication. 4. Exception to rule 3, any patient that requires extensive extrication will be deathly ill, require multiple agency response (up to and possibly including the Army Corps of Engineers) and will have the patient require your presence to save their life. 5. At least once per shift you will end up working with the "new guy" and saving one of their patients due to their inherent ineptness because this is their first day on the job. New Employee Orientation 1. On your first day, we guarantee you will be exposed to one of the following: multiple gunshot victim, cardiac arrest victim that will make it, birth, enraged psych patient who will hold you hostage until your partner does something about it, or an MCI that you will have to deal with the fact that people will die. 2. Your partner will be our most senior and grizzled paramedic who will make your life a living hell, this person will ensure that there is absolutely nothing you can do right, this person will ensure that everytime a run is completed you are to clean and decon the entire unit, and eventually will require you to save their life. 3. You will be assigned to the busiest sector available and get in trouble for not being finished with one run when you are assigned the next one.

dispatched for impaled object in finger. Arrived to find 6 y/o male with a staple through the figner nail -- embedded through the tip (i.e. white part that gets cut off) to the cuticle -- take leatherman, extract staple, mom signs refusal and promptly trims fingernails. ..... :shock:

Standardizing education requirements is a priority for EMS as a whole. This way there will be a standard of training that every EMS provider is taught anywhere they may be trained. By making this adjustment to a standard, I think that the National Scope of Practice may actually become a reality in my EMS lifetime. There should be no reason that an EMT-Basic from the east coast should have any different skill competency than an EMT-Basic from the west coast. This same reasoning also applies to Intermediates and Paramedics. I do not want to see a bunch of "cook book" pre-hospital medicine being practiced throughout the country, but rather a bunch of really solid fundamental skill sets established and practiced by every EMS provider in the country. Establishing a standard will also require that EMS becomes independant of other Federal oversight systems -- we all gripe and complain that we are not all fire service or hospital services and hopefully the Federal Government will realize this and make us a separate division of Health and Human Services.

ok -- this is an interesting thread. I am wondering how many of you all worked with a similiar system that changed over to a "set" schedule, and how was that done to make that transition? I am currently the only full time paramedic in a relatively small service. I have been trying like heck to get our director to place me into a set schedule for the last 8 months and the only slot I can guarantee is Friday overnights (not that I am complaining about Friday over nights -- I really don't mind.) I am just looking for further suggestions on how to go about getting what I want/need -- any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, P40

I have a back up question on this topic and it fits very well here. For those of you who are working with the system in question, are the full time employees guaranteed 40 hours minimum?