abandoment or not

[wemedic40]

Let me see if I'm reading this right before I respond to the situation. You're taking a patient to the hospital and their family is following you POV. You are the driver.

Family starts having chest pain, calls dispatch, dispatch tells you family is having trouble, and both of you pull over. You call for another ambulance and your partner gets out of the back of the ambulance and goes to the family's car to check them out.

Your partner and the pt's family then get into the ambulance, and you are now transporting 2 patients.

Yes?

Here's my question. Was your partner ALS? NO Were there ALS interventions in place (12 lead, IV with meds) etc ongoing when your partner left the rig? ONLY O2 WAS GOING WE ARE ONLY BLS Did you have visual contact with both your partner and the original patient the entire time? MY PARTNER WAS OUT OF THE RIG TOO

If it was pretty simple and you were right there to jump into the back to provide care if necessary while your partner was assessing the pt in the car, I'd say there was no abandonment. If ALS interventions were left unattended and it took a really freakin' long time, then it's more of a grey zone leaning towards abandonment...

And crotchity, there was a huge thread on whether you stop at an MVC or not. Usually the answer is, if you are already transporting or already committed to a call, you call dispatch and let them sort out who's closer to which in order that everyone still gets care. You don't just roll up on an MVC and stop when you're transporting someone...

Wendy

CO EMT-B

to answer your questions I WAS GOING TO TAKE CARE OF THE PT IN THE CAR WHILE MY PARTNER WAS IN THE BACK, I WAS DRIVING THE AMBULANCE WHEN THIS HAPPENED. SO THE PT IN THE CAR WAS MINE TO BEGIN WITH.

[spenac]

to answer your questions I WAS GOING TO TAKE CARE OF THE PT IN THE CAR WHILE MY PARTNER WAS IN THE BACK, I WAS DRIVING THE AMBULANCE WHEN THIS HAPPENED. SO THE PT IN THE CAR WAS MINE TO BEGIN WITH.

No need to shout. No need to be rude. You are the one that chose not to repost in english so we could be sure what you were saying.

[Doug]

Tried to have this discussion with you in the chat room.

To summerize my points:

1:I am glad to see somebody else (even if it is crotch...lol) compare this to an MCI.

2:As professionals we are trained to prioritize our pt's according to needs.

3: If you are worried about how this would have been viewed by a lawyer you should have rushed back to the original pt when it became apparent that your partner was not going to return to him/her

4: To me this can be compared to an ER RN who has more than one pt. If a nurse in the ER had the first pt and had completed an eval and a CP pt came in, there is no abandonement if that nurse leaves the first pt to begin eval of second.

5: If you, after all this, still truly feel this was abandonment youneed to turn in your partner.

[Doug]

As a side note, if this case ever did go to court one of the things any lawyer will ask is "Do you belong to any professional forums, in which you discuss relevent topics, and if so under what name do you post?" You can either lie, which I don't recommend, or you can say yes and have them turn your own words against you and your partner.

[crotchitymedic1986]

It is not abandonment, you will have to find another way to get your partner fired. And by definition this was an MCI - "a call that overwhelms your resources". Both patients were transported, no patient was abandoned. Please read this article from JEMS:

http://www.jems.com/news_and_articles/colu...E8A06F81C5179EA

Wendy, you should also read this column regarding not stopping at a critical incident (i agree that you should not stop while transporting a critical patient to check on the walking wounded at a minor MVC )

[fiznat]

I'm still not totally sure I understand the situation here, but my opinion is that you should not have pulled the ambulance over. You are delaying care of the patient on your stretcher so that you can evaluate a second patient for which you weren't available in the first place. Even if you HAD to stop the ambulance for some reason (which you didn't), there is no reason BOTH you you needed to get out and assess this second patient.

We don't pick up every sick person we see on the way to the hospital just because we're driving an ambulance. There is such a thing as available and not available. Unless the situation is extreme or unusually urgent, these other people can simply call 911 as the patient on your cot did. An ambulance will come. In the meantime, your responsibility is the patient you have in the back. Thats it.

By the way this isn't an MCI. The definition states that the demand must exceed the resources of the SYSTEM, not a single crew.

[crotchitymedic1986]

So what you are saying is that if you were transporting a "stable" back pain patient, and you rolled up on an MVC with entrapment and ejected patients, you would just roll on by ?

[Doug]

In some areas a single crew is the system I'm afraid.

[Dustdevil]

As a side note, if this case ever did go to court one of the things any lawyer will ask is ....

Irrelevant. It would never go to court because the first question the court asks is, "were there damages?".

There weren't. Case closed.

wemedic40, go read the Forum Rules and come back when you've calmed down. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has no idea what your "psa" is, unless you stopped in the middle of this abortion to perform a prostate exam on yourself.

[Doug]

You are correct about damages Dust. I was pointing out worst case scenario.

It should be kept in mind that not all protocol violations are suable (word?) You may be subject to discipline by your Med-Con or whatever your company has in place, but unless the pt can actually show that they suffered damages from your inaction you in theory can't be sued because "something COULD have gone wrong."

It is especially relevant in this case, who is going to sue? The Mother of the pt? No, she received care. The pt? No, that would make the pt a dick..they would have to say in court "I suffered because they stopped to help my mom."