first responders or emts

[spenac]

Wildfire, can I ask you a question, can you put together a sensible question. Each of the past 4 posts by you have been poorly thought out poorly worded questions frought with spelling and grammatical errors.

Come on, you can do better than this stuff.

Ruff his first day he posted 3 fast pointless comments so he could enter chat. 2 were deleted. So now he has graced us with 3 more pointless posts so he could return to chat. Poor sap did not even realize he only had to post 2 more and would have been back in chat. :roll:

[honaker]

Wildfire, can I ask you a question, can you put together a sensible question. Each of the past 4 posts by you have been poorly thought out poorly worded questions frought with spelling and grammatical errors.

Come on, you can do better than this stuff.

Did you mean to spell "fraught" while you were admonishing Wildfire for "spelling and grammatical errors?" Should "...poorly thought out" be followed by a comma? If you are going to ask a question as in "Wildfire, can I ask you a question, can you put together a sensible question." you should end the sentence with a question mark. The number "4" should be spelled out as "four" in this context.

Your post is the pot calling the kettle black.

[firedoc5]

The Dept. I was on, as of 1989, when hired you had three years to become a Paramedic. So when anyone applied after 1989 you knew up front that you also had to become a Paramedic. If you didn't want to become one, then don't apply.

There is positive and negatives to it. It's helpful to be able to make sure that in the future there would not be a shortage of Paramedic coverage, which it was quickly becoming when I got on.

A negative is that someone may be a great Firefighter, but not be able to obtain Paramedic status. Or someone who is already a Paramedic may struggle to be a sufficiant Firefighter. So you can lose quality people that really can't do "double duty"

It can also show that what people that can do both jobs successfully can reflect more positive for the Dept. with the public and state and national officials.

Not only do you have to become a Paramedic in those three years, but you have to be certified in HazMat, at least a FF II, Pump Engineer, and Extrication. Since I've left they may have amended some of these things, added or removed them.

[Upton4785]

Anyone who's read my first few posts and anyone that knows me also knows that I have very, very little experience in what all of you would refer to as "normal EMT experience". Hell, just take a look at my information to the left, I'm a corporate security representative/EMT. I work in a corporate office and on 90% of the medical calls I take, I'm backed up by more experienced, confident, and competent EMT's on Merrimack FD before I finish getting a patient history. With that in mind, take what I'm about to say as the ignorant blabbering it's probably going to become.

If you just want to be a firefighter with as little medical knowledge as possible, so be it. Go for the bare minimum and become stagnant, it only goes to help those of us willing to educate ourselves further, as the demand for competent providers will only increase with the lack of them you're creating. Furthermore, when implying that it's a mistake to make Firefighters become EMT's if they don't want to, it's equally preposterous to imply that it's ok that EMT's have to become firefighters, which is the way the system works right now, for the most part.

You can't blame the departments for wanting their employees to be able to provide the best possible care in the least possible time, and asking more from their employees is attempting to do exactly that. Besides, the Basic course is very short and easy, and if that's all your employer requires and as far as you want to go, that's all you have to do.

It's your choice how far you want to go with the medical portion of your job. All I am trying to say is you're not doing anyone any favors by choosing to remain stuck at one education level. You're not helping the patients, your employers, and even yourself. And for someone I'm assuming feels he/she has "great pride" in "serving" your community, not wishing to advance yourself to the highest level of medical education seems against your own beliefs. But it's not for everyone, and if your heart's not in it, you're also not helping us.

Lastly, to choose a forum in a place called EMT City seems a very unlikely place to get any kind of validation for the "Firefighters are too good to have to get EMS education" argument.

In the end, your quality of care depends on your level of education, and if you're content with being the bare minimum, that's fine. Like me, you'll always have better trained, more competent providers available to bruise your ego.

[Eydawn]

The point is moot. Since we need to revamp EMS education entirely, the old "EMT-B" will suffice for those wishing to pursue the Fire end of things. The medical providers will have more in depth education and their levels will be a tad different... make sense?

Since we're opening cans of worms, I thought I'd add my Zesty Flavor to the mix.

Wendy

CO EMT-B

[Just Plain Ruff]

Did you mean to spell "fraught" while you were admonishing Wildfire for "spelling and grammatical errors?" Should "...poorly thought out" be followed by a comma? If you are going to ask a question as in "Wildfire, can I ask you a question, can you put together a sensible question." you should end the sentence with a question mark. The number "4" should be spelled out as "four" in this context.

Your post is the pot calling the kettle black.

Thanks for the reminder that we all are not perfect. If you go back and review 95% of my posts you will find that spelling and grammar are correct. You found one of the 5 percent. This person put's 3 posts together and there are more spelling and grammatical errors in 3 posts than in all of my recent posts put together.

I do not call kettle's black. I wonder how long it took you to get your post completely grammatically correct so no-one can call you out.

But I digress, you caught me, Bully on you!!!!!!!

[firedoc5]

All I can say is Thank God for spell check. Maybe we should add grammer check here too. But a lot of times it's not that I'm a bad speller, just a lousy typist. #-o

[Ridryder 911]

EMT = First Responder and First Responder = EMT. Doesn't matter which one the Fire Department chooses them to have.

Case closed.

R/r 911