San Fransisco: Quality of pre-hospital 911 care questioned

[JakeEMTP]

Firefighters, among other things, claimed they could not sleep because of the sound of sirens from the responding ambulances housed at stations.

Read the next quote and see if you think their remedy is back asswards.

At the entry level will be 200 lower-paid civilian paramedics and emergency medical technicians to staff the city's ambulances. They will be hired at $65,000 or more a year, $20,000 less than fully trained firefighter paramedics.

The ambulance crews will be housed away from fire stations, and the crews will work 10- to 12- hour shifts, without the same benefits as their higher- paid colleagues.

The next rung will be firefighters, followed by the highest paid group, the firefighter paramedics created in the merger, who earn a starting wage of $85,000.

The firefighter paramedics will no longer staff ambulances on a regular basis. Instead, they will be stationed at the city's 42 firehouses, riding with fire crews to provide emergency life support until ambulance crews arrive.

They still don't get it.

[Christopher.Collins]

The city's 911 ambulance staff, experts say, is insufficiently trained and keeps patient charts that often fail to indicate the specific medical treatment provided.

Aside from lazyness, I fail to see why so many people are so poor at PCRs. Maybe in narrative writing I can see people having trouble... but unless your severley dislexic I dont see how a bunch of check boxes are so hard to fill out. I dont know though, Im OCD when it comes to paperwork and write all forms as if they were going to court. Maybe they should switch to ePCRs? The state of Connecticut has mandated this for all ambulance services. At least with thoes you have meet certain criteria before your even allowed to complete it, of course that depends on the program your running.