Dustdevil

There is no "head start" through experience. The only head start that will benefit you is through education. Take Biology, Anatomy & Physiology if available. Take chemistry. Take an expository writing course. Take advanced math. Take psychology and sociology. Take physics. Take weight training. Believe it or not, high school is capable of providing an excellent foundation for EMS practice if you aren't too blind to see the possibilities. And those courses will go LIGHT YEARS farther to prepare you for EMS practice than any piddling around with a volunteer department or Explorer post. In fact, both of those are well known to retard your progress as a new medic.

No offence, as I know that you are just now starting out on this quest for knowledge, but I have to say your current plan sucks. Back-asswards, to be specific. Go to RN, RT, or whatever you are going to do FIRST, then go to medic school. Establish a career before you waste time or money on a hobby. Establish a foundation of EDUCATION before you piddle around with tech school TRAINING. Yeah, I know it doesn't sound as exciting, but then again EMS isn't the blazing ball of excitement you think it is from watching "TRAUMA" either. Do what makes sense for your family, not what sounds exciting. Good luck!

Pretty much anything could take the place of an EMT. Taxi drivers come immediately to mind, although they would demand more money than an EMT makes. Now, if you want to talk about paramedics, that's a different story.

You just had to ruin my dinner, didn't you!?

Exactly! Ultimately, the senior medic is responsible for the actions and safety of the entire crew. Putting someone I don't know and have no control over behind the wheel is just an unacceptable risk. I am not at all against people helping out, and I gladly welcome that from any competent source. But driving is not a delegatable responsibility in my practice. Brett, as pointed out, the numbers don't bear out your theory. And driving a fire truck is completely different from driving an ambulance with people standing up in the back end. Competence at one does not automatically translate into competence at the other. You don't have to crash my ambulance to kill me. I've had enough firemen toss me around in the back of my ambulance -- without crashing -- over the years to positively conclude that this will not happen again.

EPIC WIN!!! What a bunch of whiney, fear-mongering drama queens in the FD. Get over it and go back to your recliner chair.

Well, I do agree that they have a valid, although minor point about the watches. For many years I have been disgusted by the microbiological cultures proliferating under medics' wrist watches. Few medics remove them before handwashing, and even fewer ever disinfect the watch itself. You'd be disgusted by what is growing under there. On the other hand, if you take away wrist watches, you're just encouraging more lazy medics (which is apparently epidemic in England) to let the machines determine their pulse rates for them. It's just sad that they can't trust their employees enough to simply follow infection control policies, rather than tossing out the baby with the bathwater. As for the sox, it's stupid, and the employees should grow the fuck up. If you want to entertain the kiddos, get a sock puppet. But 98 percent of all of your patients are not children, so get over it or get out. I think all teachers should have visible tattoos while teaching. As the kids see it, anything a teacher is doing is uncool, so it would discourage the kids from getting tattoos.

I can't figure out what state this takes place in, even from the original article. While I tend to agree with the above comments, there is always the extremely remote possibility that this guy was operating under medical control to perform these treatments, which in some states is completely legal, even though it pisses off a lot of medics. I've seen it happen in the event-medical field quite a few times. But yeah, that's an extremely remote possibility. And there is zero justification in the twenty-first century for someone to practise professionally at the EMT-B level for fifteen friggin' years without advancing their education. I would never hire such a person.

NOBODY besides my partner drives my ambulance. Period. If I need a firemonkey, I need them in back to hold, carry, and pass equipment, etc... If absolutely necessary, I have no problem with that. But they will NOT -- EVER -- drive my ambulance. In the back, they endanger the patient's life. I can accept that. Behind the wheel, they endanger MY life. Unacceptable.

Good stuff! Interesting timing, because I was going through some old papers last month and found the letter I used to give to my students back in the 80's. It was very similar to the one in the link above, but of course, you know me; it was a LOT longer and more verbose. The one linked above is great though, because it exhibits honesty and humility, and establishes from the beginning that the process is a PARTNERSHIP, and not a dictatorship. You're a teacher, not a supervisor. It's important for the preceptor to take shared responsibility for the student's success or failure. Every student who fails the process is a personal failure for the preceptor.

Minus 5 for using codes.

Hmmm... interesting point. I am not positive exactly you are saying, as far as whom is beating up whom. But I can certainly easily envision multiple scenarios where the media would be fuelling a controversy with sensationalism. And especially if the union is looking for publicity, as they usually are. Makes for a better story if you make it sound like an epidemic threat than if you stick with the facts. I can guarantee that you did not see that on the six o'clock. You saw it on a propaganda "beat up" movie that was in no way news or even factual. You see, we're all occasionally victims of poor information sources.

Oh really? How about you prove to us all, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that you are -REMOVED, ADMIN-. Then get back to me on how one is supposed to prove a negative. Again, it is incumbent upon her making the accusation to prove it, unless you live in a totalitarian dictatorship. tniuqs, quoting wikipedia = teh fail. Quoting Osama (the Arab, not the president) = even greater fail.

Asians... LOL!

I'm sorry that this doesn't answer your question. And I may not be clearly understanding what you're looking for, but this seems like one of those things that you really don't need a quiz for. You can either convert LPM to FiO2 or you can't. You can make up the quiz in your head and the results should be the same as any quiz you can find. It's just math, and anyone can make up the problems. Probably the best thing to do is to simply calculate every LPM through every device and print it on a table chart (like a multiplication table chart) and memorise it. There's only about a dozen possibilities that cover the entire spectrum. Memorise it like you [should have] memorised your multiplication table in elementary school. I don't see any quizzes helping you learn, and more likely they'll just slow your learning process down. By the time you get to the field, you need to have this stuff committed to memory, not having to interrupt patient care to calculate it every time.

Where do I apply for this dolt job, anyways? Sounds like a pretty good retirement gig. It's what I do best!

Phil is exactly right. I don't care what the outcome is. And I really don't think the media (except maybe for The Post) care either. But if you are going to stonewall and obfuscate the process, and if FDNY is going to be close lipped about it, giving the appearance of complicity with a cover-up, then the media is right to tear you a new one. We pay these bastards. We expect business to take place in the light of day.

Don't know. Don't care. It is just clearly evident that it has nothing to do with oil, since the US is doing nothing about oil in Iraq. Don't try to change the subject. You already know. You simply refuse to accept it, so the discussion is moot. Wrong. And as you yourself say, KBR is not synonymous with Halliburton. That would be like holding Canadians responsible for everything Great Britain does. They are not the same thing. Again, put up or shut up. I say they are not, and you cannot prove a negative. It is therefore incumbent upon you to prove that they are or STFU.

I would just say that, unless you see CPR in progress, or blood spurting everywhere, an EMT usually has zero business standing up when they ask for medical personnel. The chances of you being able to even assess the patient, much less provide them any treatment they need, are slim to none. Not to mention the probability of you being the most educated medical person on-board is even less. Never been asked for my credentials while rendering care in-flight. Never been the only medical person on-board either, so it is usually a team approach. For care, I've also never been involved in the medical control phone-in thing. Being over international waters, I guess they don't always have that luxury. You just do what you gotta do, with what you have to work with, and then quietly disappear without leaving your real name with anyone.

I believe that he is theoretically correct. I just think that he picked a very poor example to use to illustrate his theory, since these particular employees caused the rush to judgement with their own obfuscation.

Ditto. It is the theory most often aired on television, so it must be true! Yeah, if Osama takes credit for healthcare legislation (assuming it ever happens), Hillary is likely to do to him what Jesse Jackson threatened to do. It's been seven years and they haven't taken a drop of oil from Iraq. Put up or shut up with you conspiracy theories. KBR has zero involvement in oil matters in Iraq. They are a service company. Halliburton is the oil company. Halliburton is not in Iraq. As CrapMagnet said, he came in claiming that he knew what the problems were, that he knew how to fix them, and that he would do so in the first 100 days. Well, he's gone over three times past that deadline and is still claiming that he did NOT know what the problems were after all. How long is it going to take him to figure that much out? 4 years? He'll be gone by then, so I am not too worried about it anymore. It's just sad that it'll take four years of NOTHING happening to get past that. Who knows. Who cares. They are a minor force in Iraq anymore, with most of their contracts going to Fleur and Dyncorp. Have you asked who sits on their boards?

It only "works" to give you a false sense of security. Guns are illegal in the murder capitals of the US. How is that happening if laws banning them "work"? Most EMS personnel injured or killed in the line of duty are victims of motor vehicle collisions. Why don't you push for outlawing motor vehicles? You aren't going to "scare" criminals. And personally, I'd rather be struck by a pool cue than have them resort to stabbing me with their legal beer bottles, or kicking my face in with their legal boots.

Ah! And that is exactly my point! By focusing attention on the pool cues, you divert attention from the real problem, which is violence. If a carpenter does a crappy job building your home, do you blame the hammer? Of course not. You take it up with the builder, take him to court or the Better Business Bureau, and smear his name in the press, not the hammer. Nobody cares about news stories about tools. People care about news stories about PEOPLE.

ROFL! That is the embodiment of a song written by a friend of mine. The opening line is: "Don't tell mama I'm a guitar picker. She thinks I'm just in jail." - Brian Burns

Annie, the US didn't have any oil interests in Iraq. Their production has been in shambles for decades, following the Iran War, with them barely producing enough to satisfy their own domestic needs. Certainly not enough for us to take, even if we wanted to, which we have not. Plus, they are not a Gulf state. They are landlocked, making the taking of any of their oil prohibitively expensive, when we can get it cheaply and quickly from South America. Had that been our goal, it surely would have manifested itself within the last 7 years. Unfortunately, CrapMagnet is correct. Whether "most" Canadians are biased against Americans or not, it is most definitely the perception here, and that is the point. Her and I are both keenly aware of the differences between Eastern and Western Canadia. Even the pollster in the article acknowledged that. It's no mystery, and it is not overlooked by us [all too few] who allow our minds to occasionally wander outside the US. I'd buy his plane ticket. One way. I saw some documentary not long ago, possibly on the History Channel or Military Channel, where a theory was laid forth that The Red Baron was actually killed by a shot from the ground. I don't recall the details of who the shooter was thought to be though.