Timmy

Drive fast!

Music is good! I've used it with patients in the back. Also good for drowing out the whackers when their banging on about something stupid.

Me to

I see your dilemma, quiet a few students who are completing the paramedic degree at my university have the same predicament. It costs roughly $46,000 AU to do the 3 year paramedic degree, fortunately we have a system here in Australia called HECS and HELP which is a government initiative that allows students to borrow the minimum required sum of money to complete the course, this interim needs to be paid back but you have many years after you graduate to do this. It’s like taking a loan from the bank, just a little different. I haven’t heard of anything in America like this but have you looked into a student funding program or something similar? You seem pretty bright, what about a scholarship?

If you already portray the knowledge of BLS and take interest in ALS then why do the basic program?

You’re the same age as me and seem really enthusiastic. I can’t offer any advice because I don’t live in America but can offer this, get ride of this cheap and fast attitude and get your self into medic school

Just a quick question for you spider bite experts. I’ve got a young football player who has a brown skin pigmentation that spreads down both arms and torso which appeared after being bitten by a white tailed spider. His normal skin colour is olive but there’s random blotches of darker brown. Its quiet difficult to paint a mental picture, I guess if you got brown ink and randomly splashed it around his body it’d look similar. He says it sometimes gets itchy. Just wondering if anyone knew the pathophysiology behind something like this? The bite occurred a few years back and his had it check out.

As long as it's shocky and prints a cool little picture I'm happy. We have Lifepaks, MRx and Zoll at uni, really doesn’t make a difference.

Well rest assured the pay in EMS isn’t that great, so that rules out the pay check idea lol!

Maybe America could look at similar programs to what we run in Australia. A few ambulance services in Australia offer a 3 year program which involves a mix of theory and on road training. Again, you must make the cut in regards to applications but once in you undergo your 6-8 week introduction training, you’re employed as a student paramedic at a station and work under a senior paramedic. There is still quiet a bit of classroom learning, tests, essays and exams though out the 3 years but you’re also exposed to so much ‘real life’ situations. At the conclusion of 3 years you’re awarded your diploma and you have a job but have the opportunity to complete the degree with quiet a lot of recognition of prior learning and if you’re lucky the service may pay for it. I’d very much love to be completing my paramedic course this way but unfortunately I don’t meet the age requirements and life experience expectancy. I’m very much a practical/visual learning and find the course I’m doing pretty tough work and normally get extremely bogged down in the theory and become quiet confused and disorientated because we get very minimal on road exposure and I dislike treating plastic dolls and wading though multiple pages of fluff to get the point. I can read something thousands of times and still won’t understand until I can do it on a real person or watch it being done. But hey that’s just my retarded way When people make spelling mistakes it’s either laziness or illiteracy. In either case these can hopefully be rectified with some assistance from the right people hence we should be encouraging people with literacy difficulty to seek assistant and strive forward to reach their potential. It’s no good sitting here banging on about spelling mistakes if you can’t offer any solution to help fix the problem, sure spell check is an option but its only a bandaid solution to a bigger picture. Just like I received a very rude awakening when I sat my fitness assessment for clinical placement only to discover how unfit I was, so instead of dwelling on the issue and banging on about how the fitness test doesn’t relate to paramedics I decided to get a personal trainer in a hope to pass it next time!

Just to continue on re the differences between paid and volunteer. To become a paid fire officer with my service you have to be so incredibly fit, pass aptitude, fitness, psychological, literacy, numerical and so much other stuff to even be considered for the recruitment program. If you chose to apply you’re put up against thousands of other applicants who are just as good if no better than you. If you make it though the screening program for the limited number of positions with the fire college you’re in for 8 months of full time hell and hardcore training. If you make it through the fire college and gain employment then your elite your passion, dedication and desire to push your self to unbelievable limits has paid off. You’re also in for daily training for the rest of your career. I volunteer as a firefighter, the standards are considerably lower but at the same time so is what volunteers are expected to do and the situations they are put in. Same goes with EMS. To work as a paramedic in my state you must hold a 3 year degree which isn’t at all easy to pass. While completing this degree you find that you have no money, not much of a social life, spend hours on end studying crap you’ll never need on road, writing horrendously long essays that have no relevance to EMS, your away from home, family and friends and everything you know and love, bust your ass to even get a pass on the exam let alone getting a distinction and at the end of it the job security is really quiet low. Even when you pass your degree and make it to the screening program for a job the standards are pretty high and you’re competing for that one spot that hundreds of others are also going for. If you get a job you start as a student paramedic at the bottom of the food chain and have to work hard to impress the clinical instructors In conclusion paid emergency service workers here have worked there ass off to get that job that doesn’t even pay well and the hours aren’t great. Anyone can volunteer but it takes guts and determination to be paid.

**Just to give you an understanding so my mini essay makes sense. In Australia to work emergency ambulance you pretty much have to hold a diploma or degree and it’s a full time paid job. As far as volunteer programs go we do have volunteer first responder type programs for very rural and remote communities were having paid paramedics is not viable. We also have a fire medical response program in major city’s were firefighters respond in a first aid capacity with 02 and defib to mainly time critical situations/arrests, in both these situations full time paramedics are paged at the same time and I haven’t heard of any volunteer service which can transport. I volunteer with an event standby type service again we don’t transport but call the state paramedics** It seems that volunteering in Australia is quiet different compared to America. I guess people volunteer for different reasons. I think it’s important that certain standards are set and adhered to; even though it may only be volunteer I think it’s still important to maintain a professional service. I volunteer with people who do it for different reasons whether it’s a time filler in retirement, uni students studying a related field to gain practical experience, people who want to help the community, people who just want to gain first aid skills, people use it as a stepping stone into the health field, the social side and we have quiet a few health care professionals who work as ambos, nurses, docs, allied health ect and like volunteering. Unfortunately we have a small group of whacker type people but there normally kept under wraps. It’s also important to set out clear training and clinical standards, having a good training and educational work load that is flexible but still encumbers clinical competency and understanding. I find teaching everyone and making sure they all have a good grip on the ‘need to knows’ but also making the ‘nice to knows’ available and 9 times out of 10 you’ll get a good response. I was surprised as to how many people I volunteer with who fit under the ‘I like helping the community’ banner sit down and have a good look through my paramedics texts. Also having some sort of program that provides a happy medium for new members to ease them into the job without flooding them with information. Equally important is implementing a plan for the people who are in it for the wrong reasons or don’t make an effort to learn ect. My service has quiet a few guidelines on what they expect you to do in order to maintain efficiency and if not meet you’ll be made non operational, this is also good for the whackers – you either weed them out or they relies they know nothing and decide to do something about it. We also have a clinical breaching program which basically means if you stuff up we sit down and help you out, provide more training and support but if you do it again we may look start looking at other options. I think having a passion for caring, education, clinical understanding and competency is important. From what I gather in US EMS you do a course and jump in without much guidance?

I wish I was paid but I’m to young and still a student volunteering makes for good practise putting the theory into practise, at uni you never work on real people.

Ceftriaxone IV or IM

Motocross is pretty scary sometimes. Example – 40 bikes pumping towards you (all wanting that 10 grand prize) You’re sitting just below the table top so when they go for some air they wont see you, your with an unresponsive rider and they wont stop the race… Parents rock up screaming at you, your partner is arguing with the race officials, the dude on flags in one ear telling you to get off the track. Gotta love adrenaline!

Find out what his tox screen came back like

It’s Bondi Rescue :roll: Need I say more :wink: Bunch of pretty boys playing heroes. They have no clinical understanding and very basic education, the TV show and modeling contracts pay more than being a lifeguard. Most of what you see on Bondi Rescue is fake, like the night they had some dude drowning yet the camera man was 2 meters away or they give drugs without getting a history or taking vitals then 20mins later discharge them back to surfing. Its good for a laugh.

It’s called worker compensation… You hurt yourself on duty, get a doctors certificate, fill out a form and they give you money lol… :roll:

Dust you should really go easy on those Jagerbombs mate, they can get you in trouble…

What ever you do in your own time is up to you. You come on duty stoned or it compromises your treatment, patient care or affects your job in any way - find a new profession.

I’m not trying to be smart. All I seem to hear on this site is how people screw up, turf wars or something similar. People go on about being professional, there’s nothing professional about blocking an ambulance from leaving a scene with a timed critical patient, sending basic first aiders to pediatric emergency calls and the other countless articles bagging out EMS. What has it come to? Comparing real life threatening situations to stupid, fictional movies? As I read though the EMS news section I can see countless threads, all negative. Some are so stupid and unbelievable it makes me sick. People, in fact young kids are dying because of ‘professional stupidity’. A few articles just send my mind completely numb, you can’t help but think how did this happen? Really is it possible? I know there only news paper articles but even if the media did talk it up its still a stupid situation. As for the douche bag in this shenanigan, really what more can I say than he needs a psych consult and a review of his paramedic license. What brings any human being let alone a man who’s dedicated his life to helping others to block this patient from getting to the hospital? Every time I read an article along these lines I hope that the next time I log on there might actually be happy news, news that shows people have used initiative and brain power to help save a life. But I find that the cop got promoted for potentially causing serious harm. I mean, how can you possible justify it? Is anything even being done to prevent the people who are there to help you from killing you? Or will I continue to read about kids dying for stupid, insane, crazy reasons? I know a lot of people are excellent at what they do and complete their job very well but seriously, how do some of these people get jobs in EMS in the first place. I really have nothing left to say on the issue, I have no doubt that in the next few weeks I’ll log on only to find more negativity.

** Laughs then walks away rolling eyes**

MAST are those anti shock things yeah? Cant say I've ever seen them...

The whole thing seems a tad dodgy

I have no beef with the attending EMTs, while they may have made a mistake they shouldn’t have been sent to a call like that! Any pediatric emergency call should have a minimum responding crew of ALS and ICP backup, not a crew of first aiders. Not knowing the whole story and merely basing this on a newspaper article it may appear that the bashing on the door may have been misinterpreted, the situation was undoubtedly very stressing and traumatic for all involved and the fact that having a dying child in your care, in the back of your ambulance and there’s not a great deal you can do about it is unimaginable. Why weren’t the crew informed that a private ALS was on the way, in fact on scene? I mean the ALS crew has obviously been paged to the scene, a quick radio message could’ve saved a life. I slam all involved on this call, from the call talker/dispatcher/command staff and EMTs it was very poorly handled, communication and team work is lacking ever so much. I don’t think clinical training is the issue here merely how to appropriately mange a scene and liaise with others effectively.