OOPS She was Dead When I Covered Her

[JPINFV]

Google "triage".

Apparently it's a French word. Therefore, in this post 9/11 time when France is a psuedoevil-do'er, it must be a bad thing.

[Britt207]

I was always under the impression that when you triage patients, you transport the ones with life threating emergencies.

I dont care how many patients there were, The medic or medics should have checked her pulse! Not just covered her up, and go on to the next patient.

[Dustdevil]

I was always under the impression that when you triage patients, you transport the ones with life threating emergencies.

I dont care how many patients there were, The medic or medics should have checked her pulse! Not just covered her up, and go on to the next patient.

You're trying to cookbook a situation that requires education and experience, not black and white rules. Consequently, you aren't getting the point here. When patients outnumber providers, triage is done to determine who gets treatment, and in what order. I don't know anything about the other patients' conditions, but if you have two patients with possibly life threatening injuries, and a third with injuries incompatible with life, that third patient gets passed over. To devote your limited resources to an apenic patient with splattered brain matter, while two others are seriously injured and salvageable is against the principles of every triage protocol I have ever seen in thirty five years of practice. Period. End of story. By that well-established, universal principle, the initially responding medics were correct to pass over this patient (assuming that presentation is correct).

Now, the controversy comes in the small details.

• 1. Who covered her up? Was it the initially responding medics? If he/they actually took the time to do it, that seems to indicate that the weren't in that big a hurry to move on to the other patients, which negates the "triage" excuse.

2. Why didn't the second in medics assess the patient? Was she already covered up? Did somebody tell them not to bother, because she was dead? If so, whom? While the local protocols may say something about assessing all patients, I would bet money that they don't require a medic to go reassess a patient that has already been assessed by other medics. In that case, they are in the clear, although I rarely take anybody's word for it without checking for myself.

3. If she was not covered up when the second crew got there, and they covered her without assessing her for spontaneous vitals, then they are dead wrong, for sure. Even with injuries incompatible with life, you still must transport if you have the resources to do so, which the second crew should have, or at least should have arranged for.

4. Who exactly was it telling the cops that the patient was going to die in a few minutes? Whoever that was, is in a sticky situation, if they had the resources to transport her, as in the second or third crew. But if they lacked the resources, and the stupid cops were mouthing off and distracting them from caring for the other patients just because they were freaking out over a dying body, then they were right to try and explain that she was "pending", and therefore low on the transport priority list.

• But yes, if she was still breathing at the point that the other patients were already taken care of, and resources existed to care for her too, and somebody refused because they didn't think she was salvageable, then they're screwed, and rightly so.