Resqmedic

I believe it was touched on in a earlier post, but confined space heaters are portable and actually work quite well in these conditions. You can take the propane heater a bit away and take the attached tube and run it right into the vehicle to directly heat the PTs and rescuers. Nice thing is you probably won't have to spend a dime to get one. Check out your local decon trailer, most of them have one, confined space teams will have them, and even utility companies will have them roaming around your community for under ground work. Call up the phone or power guys, I am sure they would be thrilled to help out.

Isn't it interesting with something in our little world makes it into he big time. So here is my little story to muddy the waters. We get dispatched last week to a local nursing home we will just call them "Tenderscare" as to keep things anonymous. The dispatch info "Elderly male, cardiac arrest, nurses fighting over doing CPR", we get there a tech is actually doing CPR, run the arrest, convert the guy after a whole lotta zaps and drugs, Ends up getting discharged. What happed was the tech was walking the guy to the toilet, he vagaled and went down cracking his head on the toilet, the nurses wouldn't allow anyone to help him until they went back to the nurses' station and checked his code status. So liability wise who is the wrongest?

So I just posted a bunch of pictures on this site from a fundraiser I did with a bunch of guys from my shift from last weekend, it's the American Lung Association's Fight for Air Climb. http://www.lung.org/donate/events/fight-for-air-climb/ Now I know there are a million charities seeking your support, and cancer seems to get the lion's share of it, but think of the patient's we pick up in acute distress the most often, the lung problems. COPD, Asthma, Lung CA, the list goes on and on, and the funding for research pales in comparison to the demand for treatments. So what we did was sign up and pay our $25 registration and then raised a $100 each, it's not much, but when you have thousands of people doing it, well that makes a difference. We put on our full firefighter turnout gear and climbed 70 stories into the sky. Good time, great team building activity. when we got to the top Detroit EMS was waiting there to help up pull off packs and rehab, kudos to Detroit's various EMS services for being so great.

Wow, that is a great article, well worth listening to. And the following comments were also worth browsing. It is indeed a looming problem, it's hard to justify a huge percentage of a fire department's budget to pay for people that don't work there anymore. Sadly in a great many cases this stems from the cities not properly funding their pensions in the first place, or borrowing from the fund hoping that tomorrow would never come. It is difficult to defend a pension system where people make almost twice the amount in retirement that the people currently working pay. My fire department has a pension system, it's a private system so the city can't raid it for their needs, but that being said, I currently pay 23.9% of my gross wage into it. Guys who retired just 10 years ago were paying only 0%-2%, and my annual pay raise for the past 5 years has been 1% or less. And I won't even bring into how much Obamacare has cut into my finances, pension systems are really great when the economy is consistently expanding. However these days it seems to be musical chairs, the last guy standing is going to be left out in the cold.

Ok, here is a useless drug, before we had Albuterol we had...... Trebutaline!!! Give it sub Q and wait for nothing to happen. And who remembers High dose Epi? My highest score was 38mg on a cardiac arrest.

Well honestly if you get a normal 2WD you will have the same wheel base and tires, however you will probably have a high stand over and thus a taller truck being more top heavy. We have been running ford F350/450/550 for years, but all 2WD, never had problems getting stuck.

Watch out getting a 4X4 ambulance, the ford fronts have poor turning radius with a live front axle. Sadly Chevy had a great 3500 4X4 front end but for some reason they stopped making it. Also if you put on allot of mileage your going to have problems with a 4X4.

Funny thing about the Litmans, we are having more war veterans join our ranks at the FD, and many of them have significant hearing loss due to getting blown up frequently. We have bought a number of the mater cardiology IIs and some of the more expensive electronic ones, but the verdict on those is still out.

I see nurses in my nightmares...............

We actually have a High School EMS program, when you graduate you can take the national registry after your 18th birthday. Great success with it and had allot of kids go on to get full time jobs. Plus like Mari said, it's great to have some young blood infused into our departments.

Your NR should be able to get you hooked up with allot of places, but it's the short term employment thing most people are going to have a problem with. Are you looking to get hired or just do ride alongs? We have people from all over the world ride with us from time to time, but not to offer employment.

When I was in medic school I always studied at the local coffee shop, nice and quiet, ready access to caffeine (before the days of wifi even). One day I was banging my head against my books on the table trying to make the cardiology go inside when a older gentleman walked by me and said "Trying to learn cardiology huh?" He was the head of the Heart center at the hospital, and I learned more from him in he 20 minutes he spent talking to some dumb medic student while waiting for his wife, than I did my entire year of Cardiology in school.

Like 80% of my EMT students these days. Hey Mari, is Iowa a National Registry state?

Surprisingly enough money isn't an issue and people do get paid $15 per hour per run, and we are not a transporting service. I work full time at a ALS transporting department and spend enough time trying to write reports for billing and cost recovery I don't think that would fly well. Although you do raise a good point, as an officer I get paid by the department monthly, the rank and file gets paid quarterly. I do think money is a motivator and I also believe it should be a issue that gets looked at.

What made you make the decision to bite the bullet and go back to school?