N.J. Supreme Court Rules Couple Can Sue Rescue Squad

[BillKaneEMT]

Ok. The original suit was thrown out because the law protects individual emt's but there is no law protecting a "squad"? Idiotic.

Here's the thing. I hate New Jersey. I used to work there as a truck driver and it was awful. Some parts were pretty nice I assume but I was always stuck in Newark and Jersey City and those are, in my opinion, the worst two cities in the continental US. Despite my personal feelings about the state, and despite all the awful things I've heard about their EMS, this decision strikes me as being completely wrong. I'm not defending their choice to sit on scene doing cpr for 30 minutes. I'm just saying that if the law protects individual emt's you really shouldn't be able to call two of them together a squad and then sue away.

I started reading the comments and made it through three of em. I had to stop after reading:

"

Get with the times, things have changed. Load and Go is gone, stay and play is proven..."

Ok. I disagree with this. A BLS rig has such limited equipment and it's occupants such limited training that I feel load and go once the patient is packaged is, the majority of the time, the way to go. How bout that total lack of pain management? Oh, you wanna hook the pt to a monitor? Better have an ALS rig then. Or buy your own. We load and go just about every time. Admittedly we're pretty much always within 5 minutes of a hospital, 10 at most. Pretty much any treatment beyond splinting, use of an epi-pen following a bee sting reaction, pressure bandages, etc; would be better performed by a full ER that's 5 minutes drive away. I have yet to run into any really significant trauma on the job, the vast majority of our calls are medical and most of the bad ones are done by ALS so my opinion may be incorrect. I probably would have started cpr and kept it going on the way to the hospital. Partner drives, I keep it up in the back.

I doubt the patient would have survived, and of course I'd be getting sued now for not staying in place to continue cpr, but that's probably the choice I would have made.

[DwayneEMTP]

Right, wrong, or neutral, the case will likely once again give people cause to walk by those in need instead of stopping to help. And that's too bad....

It sounded to me like the ruling from the Supreme Court didn't come with any joy. When he mentioned that it was their job to interpret statute, not to create it, he seemed to me to be making a point...