Firefighters union again asks to run KC’s ambulance service

[SANDMEDIC]

:shock: I hear there is an agency outside St Louis, Missouri in which you rotate monthly to three different jobs. Paramedic one month, Police Officer the next and then firefighter for the third and final month.

Apparently they are one of the highest paid agencies in St Louis County.

Talk about a pain to stay on top of everything.

[CBEMT]

I work as a Firefighter/paramedic

Well, that explains a lot.

[Arizonaffcep]

I think I'm gonna sit back with some popcorn and watch...

[Just Plain Ruff]

I don't get the anti fire take over here. I work as a Firefighter/paramedic and don't see what the big deal is.

ok, here's the skinny and down and dirty reason

you have two people

One is a firefighter/medic

the other is medic

The firefighter/medic has to keep up on how to put out fires and all that education and also has to keep up with keeping knowledgeable (sic) with the medical side of the equation.

With every fire department that runs EMS they put less emphasis on the EMS side than they do on the Fire side.

The medic is required to keep up with EMS only.

There is a well documented foundation that if you are required to keep two major careers (yes Firefighter/Medic is two careers) then your knowledge is going to be less for Each career than if you only focused on one career.

I know this how?????

I was in consulting and also EMS for a short time. I had to keep up on all the knowledge that I had to learn and to keep in my head about the field of consulting I was in. (Hospital Emergency department systems) as well as keep up with my CEU's and general EMS knowledge. I realized that I could not keep both of them in my head with great accuracy. I slowly let my EMS knowledge decrease in direct proportion of how much I was learning on the consulting side. By the time I had been in Consulting for a year my retaining of EMS knowledge was mediocre at best.

I chose to focus on consulting and I feel that I was one of the best of the best consultants while when I was focused on EMS (at my previous full time job) I considered myself one of the better medics working. I found out quickly that you cannot excel in both unless you are a genius and that's probably not the case.

Either choose to do one or the other but to do both is to do a disservice to both yourself and your patients and citizens.