Dustdevil

Thanks, P40! Very helpful, my friend!

Hmmm... I must not have gotten to the "other forum" topic yet. :? But yeah, 51 is right on the money with his post.

How many EMS systems have you worked in? How many states? How many towns or counties? How many years? From what experiential perspective do you assert that "most" people in EMS are great drivers? I contend that you are mistaken. Is a drunk driver who has never been caught still a "great" driver? Of course not. Their driving records are not reflective of their competence. Stephan is right. The great majority of partners I have had, I have had to completely retrain in order for their driving to be acceptable, both emergency and non-emergency. While I am sure that things have improved in the last decade since I have been out, I see that we are still recruiting from the same ranks of lazy, unemployable kids with minimal education, whose only draw to the business is the adrenalin factor. Oh, and the spiffy uniform and badge. :roll:

Yes. Constantly. Some do it while admitting up front that they are speculating, which isn't a particularly bad thing. But others do it with an air of authority as if they are an expert on the topic, when in fact they know little to nothing about the subject at hand.

I am not confident of the popular response to them, but I for one would like to see well chosen and informative teaching posts here.

True enough, but apparently irrelevant. I don't recall Kevkei saying anything about tracheostomy. Not all surgical airways are tracheostomies, and he didn't imply they were.

There are a buttload of sites with lung sounds. However, many of their samples come from the same site, which is www.RALE.com. Three good ones with different sounds are: http://medocs.ucdavis.edu/IMD/420C/sounds/lngsound.htm http://www.vh.org/adult/provider/internalm...LungSounds.html http://www.umshp.org/rt/sounds/sounds.html Good luck!

Vandy rocks! 8)

I'm afraid you misunderstood me. I wasn't suggesting that you should rush. I was wondering why it is you rush your patient to the ambulance instead of stabilizing their condition in the house? If they truly need an IV, don't they need it now and not five minutes from now? If they need lidocaine, don't then need it now, and not five minutes from now? If they need D50, don't they need it now and not five minutes from now? You gotta figure that it took you upwards of ten minutes or more to reach them after the initial call. And they had already been in trouble well before that or they wouldn't have called 911. So why does anybody insist on making their patient wait even longer for treatment by dragging them to the ambulance for something you could have already done in the house? I don't quite understand what you are saying about your SOP's. Can you clarify?

Okay, but why? Why should your patient have to wait five more minutes to receive advanced care? Isn't that what you were sent out to deliver? And, as asked in the original post, what does your local SOPs say about the matter? What did your paramedic school teach you? And does the controversy exist within your agency, or does everybody do it the same way as you?

Sounds like Heaven to me!

Hey 51, is it true that EMT-I is the mandated entry level for EMS in Tennessee? I heard this and I think it sounds too wonderful to be true!

Squint, I don't have a problem with anything you have posted. It is obvious that you are seasoned and knowledgeable. It just adds a lot of perspective knowing where you are coming from. And simply listing the province you are from is FAR from revealing any sensitive personal information that might be crucial to your anonymity, unless you are one of maybe three medics in all of the NWT. Thanks for the info.

Is that your cute way of saying you're not going to tell us where you are? :? If you're going to go on and on about how things are where you are, it would be polite to at least tell us where that might be.

Squint, exactly what province is "the wind" in?

Bravo! =D> But we'll get to answering your question only after somebody tells me why we're allowing immature illiterates to practice emergency medicine with less than a college education.

Other than a very few bad experiences ( to be expected over thirty years ), I too have always had good luck with FD first responders. I am only saying that if I had my druthers, I would rather simply have more medics to help me. So long as FD's run first response, they are used by the bean counters as an excuse to not fund EMS adequately. I would like to see that change.

Okay, that sounds good. If it is a call where a first responder or assist crew is needed, I would certainly rather it be another ambo than a fire crew. Any chance your fire chief will come talk to mine?

Ditto what Rid said in his last two posts. Thanks for saving me the time, Rid! What happened to "Emergency" (aka. Emergency Product News) magazine anyhow? Did it die with DynaMed? It was a great mag in its day. But of course, it was about 75 percent an advertisement for DynaMed. But at least it got the ball started.

Sorry... I'm still distracted, trying to figure out why you keep sticking the "@" sign everywhere. :?

Two is too many? Or do you mean two plus a fire engine is too many?

The only one I still receive is "Military Medicine." It's a great read, and isn't all about battle trauma as the name might imply to some. It covers a broad spectrum of medical topics. Once I get back to the field, I intend to subscribe to JTrauma, EN, and some others. Most agencies I have worked have JEMS and EMS laying around the office or station, so there is no need to subscribe. I share your vision, Bro. I truly do. But I am realistic about the motivation and intellect of the average medic in this country too. The high-end education for our field is an Associates degree. And those who hold it are resented by the tech-school medics because "all that book learnin' don't make you start IVs better than me!" :roll: Until the educational dilemma in EMS is solved, I'm afraid I don't see any financial incentive for anyone to publish a truly scientific EMS journal. Not enough people to buy it. For that matter, not enough medics doing research to fill it. Consequently, for the forseeably distant future, we're stuck with the entertainment mags like JEMS, and the intellectual medics will simply have to continue to leech off of the medical and nursing journals for worthwhile science.

Not sure I'm going to be around in March, but I'd sure like to go. Randy Mantooth is going to be there!!! =D> For any of you who have not been to an EMS Today conference, I HIGHLY recommend it. They are excellent. You get a bunch of CE hours out of it. The exhibit hall itself is darn near worth the price of the conference, as you will pick up a lot of great info there and see new products that your agency is too cheap to buy. And if you are smart, you'll do some networking and meet a lot of people whom it will be beneficial to know in the future. Not to mention, you'll just meet a lot of fun people and have a great time. Of course, Baltimore sucks. I'd much rather be on the beach somewhere, or Orlando or San Antonio maybe. But I guess it beats Detroit or Terre Haute.

Sweet! I was assuming it was a normal system with too few ambulances to serve the population. I would love to work in a system that could send another ambo as my backup instead of a fire engine! But hold it, you're talking about sending another ambo AND a fire engine? Are the ambos tiered, or all ALS? This is interesting.

What exactly is great about it? Why would any of those patients need four medics and two ambulances? :?