JPINFV

Well, if you want to get technical, the city should already have the bucket brigade anyways, so really all you're doing is forcing them to work for their money.

Yea, but you can't store those in a cabinet as easily.

^ Damn, you might be on to something. Did they give him any aspirin? /learned about Reye's Syndrome in biochem recently

^ Why don't you have a seat over there?

Well, everything comes down to poo.

Err, with 120 hours of "training," were you expecting something different? Until it kills a patient. Maybe you could tell us if the saying, "What happens in the cell, stays in the cell" is correct after you get out of jail when you kill a patient by giving medications that you are neither educated, trained, or allowed to give [i.e. nitro that was not prescribed to the patient].

Welcome to page 3.

Any family history?

Were you expecting a single concrete answer? You asked for people's opinion on if you should stay a basic for a bit or become a paramedic immediately. People are going to have different reasons and different opinions on which you should do, and since the "BLS for a year, then ALS" is for all means an EMS "tradition," [paying your dues, BLS, before AL, [insert another cliche here], people are going to have strong opinions on it. Your question was answered by different people, then the discussion moved on the discuss the merits between immediate and delayed entry to medic school. Personally, I'd rather have advice that's well debated than advice that seems to be apriori, "because I said so," or "that's the way it's always been."

^ Of course. Simple rules for EMTs from the company. 911=Do what the firemedic says, no questions asked. BLS=Do what the facility says, no questions asked.

^ Huh? Your company requires both EMTs to wear jackets or no one wears a jacket? Screw that, I get cold too easily to let my comfort be at the whim of my partner with regards to a piece of the uniform.

They referenced War Games on the TV show Chuck this week.

If I was responding and the dispatcher KNEW and REFUSED to inform me of a contagious airborne disease and I got it, I'd make damn well sure to share said disease with that dispatcher. There should ALWAYS be a way to confidentially communicate information with a crew, be it informally [cell phones] or formally [MDT, pages, scrambled radio frequencies]. There is enough risk in health care. Most of this risk, as in numerous jobs, can be greatly mitigated. If such information is not passed on, then the dispatcher is morally and ethically, if [probably] not legally, negligent.

As long as any payment plans are mutually agreed upon between the customer and provider [healthcare IS a business after all], then I have no problem with it. As far as wait time, I think that there might be a little observer bias. The ER isn't a first come, first serve place. When you notice someone waiting, there might be a very good reason such as the emergency room not having an appropriate bed available or because of how the emergency room is set up. For example, at one of the hospitals in the area I used to work in had a program called "Triage Plus." Essentially, they used the code room to see patient in the waiting room so that the physicians can do an exam and start running tests. While waiting for the results to come back from any lab work that was needed, the patient waited in the waiting room.

Simple, just because you have a list of directions, especially if given over the air [turn right at x, turn left at y, etc), you probably won't get any distances. This can be a problem, especially if long distances are involved between turns, because you won't know how soon the next turn is nor will you know if you passed it. Mapping yourself will also let you look to see if there is a closer hospital or better route. Thomas Guides for the win!

Well, at least someone got the point.

Oh, snap. Thanks.

Fixed it for you.

Same thing that the boy who cried wolf said. There comes a point when there are so many unlegit scares that you ignore the legit ones.

Your forgetting killer bees, global warming [it's 50 degrees in Boston right now. I don't know where this global warming is, but can it hurry up?], tsunamis, mega earth quakes, forest fires [no rain=dry brush, lots of rain = more brush than normal], dirty bombs, shoe bombs, light bright pictures of cartoon characters that used batteries [boston], violent video games causing school shootings [yes, your little snowflake is killing people because he played Doom and/or Counter Strike], lap top bombs, liquid bombs, cell phones causing brain cancer, and the Y2K bug.

Didn't you get the memo? EMS stands for Earn Money Sleeping. If we were told that people needed help, then we wouldn't be able to fulfill that mission.

Why is EMS the only health care field that I can think of that requires their students to spend time as a glorified first aid'er before accepting them? Doctors have a bigger trick bag then paramedics, yet they accept students right out of college, and in some cases [bS/MD combined programs] right out of high school.

Err, example of a disease that a health care provider can't tell another health care provider about please? If dispatch knows that a patient has a communicable disease then they BETTER find some way to communicate that to me before I get there. If a patient in a health care facility is handing off a patient to me that has a communicable disease, I better learn about it when I'm receiving report. Period. If you want to pull me aside to tell me, then do so, but it is NOT something I want to find out by reading the patient's face sheet.

Legally speaking, if you don't use the patient's name then it shouldn't be a problem to say it over the air [assuming that the channel is not scrambled]. That said, legal, moral, and tact are three different things. If you are in a small town type area, I'd suggest having the unit call you. If you are in a big city type area where the responders are likely to not know the patient, then I'd just say it over the air. A third option would be to page the crew if you use pagers and can send out custom pages.