Dustdevil

Five minutes in, and it's still the same old shyte. Too much hysterical melodrama from the blonde bimbo. Too much indiscriminate HEMS use. Too much off-duty camaraderie and fraternisation among the crews. Too much trying to impress people with pointless medical terminology speak.

Welcome to the 20th Century, Kentucky.

LOL! That photo was just begging to be chopped! The interesting thing about the article is how shocked the series creator is about the hate from those in EMS. Is he for real? I thought the guy had actually been in EMS himself. There's no way he could have really been an EMS professional for any amount of time and actually believed that we would approve of his delusions.

Or at least have ambulances respond to the helo scenes too! Actually, the best thing they could do with that helicopter is exactly what we do with helicopters in the real world. They run IFTs all day long, occasionally stopping to pick up a broken leg from an MVA, that is already treated and packaged by the ground crew. And, of course, the broken leg is dismissed from the ER in 3 hours.

Just remember that practice tests are tools ONLY for judging if you are ready for testing. They are NOT to be used to learn or refresh yourself for the examination. If you use practice tests for that purpose, you're likely to fail hard.

Learning to choose a proper thread name for your question would greatly enhance your career. Renamed.

Dude, I'm there!

Yeah, we're about as bitter as all the restaurant owners in LA who are sick of the constant turnover of waiters, who never cared about their job in the first place, because they're just waiting to get a call back from Hollywood. The fire service is a parasite on the back of Emergency Medical Services that costs this nation lots of dollars and lots of lives. If you're not bitter about that, you're not living in the real world.

If you haven't read the article, stop and do so now. It was written by a member of this forum, so he knows what he's talking about! And no, I won't post it here. Y'all need to go give his article hits and leave feedback! http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/2010/03/02/2010-03-02_nbcs_trauma_has_chance_to_revive_itself.html

So much fail. As usual, JEMS succeeds in taking a fairly decent article and screwing it up. The guy wasn't a "chief". He was just another firefighter doing his job. Why JEMS decided to posthumously promote him to chief, I can't figure out. But the original article did not do so. I can't say it ever surprises me to see a claim of substandard care coming out of Louisiana though, especially if it is fire-based.

I honestly don't know the statistics. I just know that we get a story posted about it several times a year. It raises some very serious questions, like: 1. Why the Hell are we being used to transport people who need no medical services that we offer? What's wrong with a police car? 2. Do not the cops have both the authority and the responsibility to take these people? 3. Do we not have the right to refuse the cops and/or ERs request to transport them? 4. Why is any medic allowing this to happen without the patient being properly restrained and accompanied? 5. What laws and/or policies are hindering us in dealing with this problem? 6. What lack of laws and/or policies is hindering us in dealing with this problem? 7. Would you personally physically engage a patient to prevent him from taking a dive out of a fast moving ambulance?

Or join the Air Force and combine the two! http://www.pararescue.com/recruiting.aspx

Yeah, Kate leaving MD kind of cut off the annual announcement of JEMS this year. I'm not sure why it has been there the last five years. But I suspect that is going to start killing attendance figures, if it has not already. Not that I have anything against Baltimore (I do), but once you've been there, it's time to move on. They must be getting a major kickback from the City convention bureau. It's still winter FFS! What kind of idiots schedules a convention up in New England like that? Move it down to Vegas or Biloxi or St. Petersburg.

I can assure you that you will feel exactly the same way about EMS within a year of becoming a paramedic, even if you somehow manage to land a real EMS job. It ain't what you see on Turd Watch. The real world is completely different, and frankly every bit as boring as driving a delivery truck. In fact, driving a delivery truck is pretty much all we do. Are you also willing to give up any kind of social life, hott girlfriends, or life's little luxuries (decent car, cable TV, vacations, money for dates) to become an EMT? Forever? Seriously, there is NOTHING about this job that makes it even worth considering making that kind of change. You'll kick yourself for the rest of your life. Best scenario is generally to move to your destination and then attend school. That way you get insight into the local culture, job outlook, and how things work there. Trust me, going to EMT or Paramedic school in LA and coming to Dallas will set you up for serious culture shock and FAIL. Not to mention that both the cost of living and the cost of schools in Texas is MUCH better than anywhere in Calif. Problem is, how are you going to support yourself through three years of school if you drop your $60k job and move out to Texas? Are you sitting on a trust fund? If so, go for it. If not, then I seriously suggest you spend a lot more time at this forum, as well as riding in some ambulances as an observer, before you make any career move because again, this field is quite honestly NOT what you seem to think it is. Job prospects are extremely low, nationwide. Salaries are at the poverty level nationwide. It's not exciting. It's not fast paced. It's just monotonous, repetitive, abusive, and exhausting, and does not bring you the slightest bit of appreciation or satisfaction. If you want to be a half-way competent practitioner, you need a year of college courses before you even attend EMT school. That means you're looking at a year before you even have entry level credentials. Those with entry level credentials are a dime a dozen, and most of them are so horny to be a hero that they'll do the job for free. That means that there are no positions, and those positions that do exist pay very little whatsoever, and usually have nothing to even do with EMS. They're just horizontal taxi driver jobs for minimum wage. The schedule at one of those jobs is usually so overwhelming that you simply don't have time to attend school full-time, so it will take you much more than another two years to become a paramedic, if you ever get there at all. Less than 10 percent of all EMTs ever become a paramedic. And while there is a greater job market for Paramedics than for EMTs, they are still seriously underpaid because of the glut of whackers who don't think their job is worth much and work for peanuts. Not to mention that they also share the problem of the EMTs, which is that most of their jobs have NOTHING to do with EMS. Bottom line is, the chances of anyone going from zero to full-employed Paramedic in less than four years is extremely low in most of this country, unless they intend to be a firemonkey. And even then, the competition is so great that you still have a hard time finding that job. Too many. Way too many. My advice is that, unless your sole motivation for choosing EMS is that you simply cannot think of any cooler exercise for your mind than the scientific challenge of the practice of medicine, you should simply forget it. If you just think this would be "cool" or "fun" or "exciting", you are beyond delusional and should move along. If you are looking for something easy or fast to get into, this isn't it. And even if you do, once you realise it isn't for you, you're fucked, because there is nowhere else you can go with it, and you've just wasted several years of your life figuring it out, just like the over fifty percent of all medics who leave EMS within the first ten years. Don't be a statistic. If medicine is really your calling, then the best advice you can get is to go to nursing school, and then move into EMS from there. It works very well. The opposite direction, it hardly works at all. Start at the bottom and you're trapped at the bottom forever. If the scientific and intellectual challenges of medicine are not your real calling, then neither is EMS, so again, move along. Wanna be a hero? Be a fireman. Whatever you do, good luck.

LOL! You should have come to this forum BEFORE starting school. We sure would have let you know of the disappointment you were in for. It's no big secret. You just won't get any of the schools to tell you the truth about it. All they do is feed you those stupid DOL reports about all the wonderful job prospects that are supposed to exist in EMS, which is a big lie. That said, I would say that probably 99 percent of us came into EMS with a completely mistaken understanding of what it was all about, and what we were in for. Those of us who were determined to do so, overcame the odds and somehow carved a mediocre career out of it, so it can be done. But if you now have, or intend to have a family in the next twenty years, I'd say RUN while you can. This is no profession for anyone with family responsibilities.

This is becoming epidemic. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,587649,00.html Teen Dies After Highway Jump From S.C. Ambulance Monday, March 01, 2010 Associated Press GREENVILLE, S.C. — A teenager has died after jumping out of a moving ambulance on an interstate highway in South Carolina. Multiple media outlets reported the 16-year-old boy died shortly after the leap near Greenville while be was being driven to a psychiatric hospital in Columbia Coroner Mike Ellis says the teen was restrained on a gurney in the back of a Greenville Hospital Systems ambulance when he loosened his restraints, moved past an emergency technician, opened the door and jumped. Emergency workers treated the teen before taking him back to the hospital in Greenville, where he was pronounced dead minutes later. An autopsy was planned Monday.

The entire State of Louisiana is in the dark ages of both EMS and fire evolution. So what exactly qualifies this guy to make policy for the rest of the country?

Wait... is the the same whale they had to cut out of her apartment in Houston?

She doesn't even pay to live there. And I doubt she'll pay for the ambulance ride either. In fact, her wheelchair was probably free too. I wouldn't count on her paying to fix the window. However, we'll all be paying for her.

You can't say "titty" here.

Interesting note on the Pittsburgh situation. Someone [claiming to be] within PEMS is commenting on the politics of the issue. Not surprisingly, it sounds like more firemonkey madness to me. http://tooldtowork.blogspot.com/2010/02/comment-from-someone-in-pittsburgh.html

The Duck is all I have ever known of. If there is such a thing as a LARK, I am unaware of it.

It really seems that all three of us were pretty much saying the same thing. ERDoc's example was excellent. The glucometer showed a seriously low BGL. Yet, rather than go, "Oh boy! That's another 'skill' I get to perform on this patient!", the time was taken to both confirm the reading multiple times AND to analyse the patient's overall clinical picture before precipitously implementing a plan. I believe that is exactly what Crotch was originally suggesting, as it is certainly what I was suggesting.

Oh, I completely agree with you on that point. No doubt. I wasn't suggesting that the city should invest in a huge fleet of snow plows, that will only get used a few days a year. I was suggesting how easy it would be to contract out snow plow work when needed, avoiding the cost of maintaining an unused fleet year round. That's why all those guys run around with plow mounts on the front of their trucks. And if they thought they could get more work with them, you'd see a lot more people investing in those mounts for their trucks. This is exactly what the US government is doing on many fronts. You know why there are tens of thousands of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan providing every service from food service, to vehicle maintenance, to construction, to medical care? Because even at the higher civilian salaries, it's still a lot cheaper than maintaining a standing army large enough to do it themselves. Unfortunately, it seems like Pittsburgh's plan is to simply have no plan at all.