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Change Medicare? Save EMS

9 comments

I’ve said this before, and I’ll continue to say it until I can do something about it: The Fee-For-Transport model has failed EMS. We have to change it and we have to change it soon.

In fact, I believe that the entire revenue model we use for our industry has failed. I think that the “Fee for Transport” model employed by the Emergency Medical Services industry is flawed, archaic, outdated, and is not conducive for the development of our profession. I think it stifles growth and development. I think that it is unfair to make this inequity up through local property taxes.

I think it has to change.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Let’s hear what Medicare has to say on the subject:

“The Medicare ambulance benefit is a transportation benefit and without a transport there is no payable service. When multiple ground and/or air ambulance providers/suppliers respond, payment may be made only to the ambulance provider/supplier that actually furnishes the transport.” (https://www.cms.gov/manuals/Downloads/bp102c10.pdf)

Yes, that’s what that means: Medicare sees EMS solely as a “transport provider.”

Basically Medicare is saying that all they’re going to pay for is taxi service. Sure, they’ll reimburse some other expenses, but without the taxi component, they’re not picking up the tab. They’re certainly not going to pay for you to provide medical care for one of their clients on a scene. They’re not going to pay you for sweetening up an unresponsive diabetic and leaving them at their house, they’re not going to pay you for providing Community Paramedicine, and they’re certainly not going to pay you for other home health or primary care services. To them, we’re a medical transport industry. They pay for transportation and that’s it. Sure, they make a differentiation between “Emergency” transportation and “Non-Emergency Transportation” and use the term “skilled medical treatment” for some of the things done in the back of our rigs, but that whole “transportation” thing is always there. No transport, no payment. It’s as simple as that.

This very appropriate image was sent in to me by Matthew Rausenberg while I was writing this post. Thanks Matt!

Not sure about that? Well, here’s more reading on what Medicare WILL and WILL NOT pay for in this informative booklet that I just printed out for every EMT at my service to read:

That’s the link to the “Official Government Booklet” that explains:

  • “When Medicare Helps Cover Ambulance Services”
  • “What Medicare Pays”
  • “What You (the patient) Pay”
  • “What to do if Medicare Doesn’t Cover Your Ambulance Service”

I’ll admit, this is pretty light reading by government standards, but it’s important for all of us in the profession to read, understand, and know this stuff. Sure, I know that some of you out there are going to fall back on our old standby statement that “I’m not in this for the money, I just want to help people” or some other platitude just like that, and I understand and appreciate your altruistic motivations… but I will tell you that EMS needs money to operate. Whether you’re a volunteer or a full-time paid employee, your ambulance service needs money to function. Paid employees need to make a living, ambulances need fuel, stations need heat, equipment needs to be replaced, and communities need 24-hour ambulance coverage to meet both their emergency and non-emergency needs. Ambulance services are critical for any community, no matter their capacity, and all of that stuff takes money. Medicare, through the “Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Serivices” (CMS) sets the tone for the entire healthcare payment industry and by default they have become responsible for propping up a majority of ambulance services through providing the lion’s share of their total revenue in some areas. They’re the big dogs in the healthcare payment arena… and they’re holding us back.

Not that I’m solely picking on Medicare here… but let’s read further into their definitions, shall we? (From the second document I linked to above):

“Emergency ambulance transportation

Emergency ambulance transportation is provided after you’ve had a sudden medical emergency, when your health is in serious danger, and when every second counts to prevent your health from getting worse. The following are examples of when Medicare might cover emergency ambulance transportation:

  • You’re in severe pain, bleeding, in shock, or unconscious.
  • You need oxygen or other skilled medical treatment during transportation.
  • You need to be restrained to keep you from hurting yourself or others.

These are only examples. Medicare coverage depends on the seriousness of your medical condition and whether you could have been safely transported by other means.”

Clearly, Medicare thinks that only “Skilled Medical Care” provided whilst tires are rotating under a patient is valuable. They pay no attention to the fact that there are better and cheaper alternatives out there that our profession could offer them. I know that Medicare represents taxpayers and the payments they give out are tax dollars, and I appreciate and want them to be responsible with those tax dollars…

I just don’t think that they are.

Medicare has determined that the only way they can be responsible with our tax money is to deny as many payments as possible and to only pay for the bare minimum that they feel is important. That’s why ambulance services are “Transportation providers” in their eyes. However, this ignores so much potential in cost savings in my opinion. They pay no attention to the fact that while it’s nice that they pay for “Wait-and-return” ambulance transfers to and from nursing homes and clinics, those services could be provided in a lot of cases by paramedics who could take care of the patient’s needs on site and save them a ton of money by offering the new service. They ignore the fact that if they provided a $250-$300 benefit for an ambulance to come, fully assess, treat an unresponsive hypoglycemic diabetic, and then release them safely without transport, they could avoid the (estimated) $500 transport bill and subsequent $1000 ER bill. The savings are potentially enormous… and there are a ton of ideas like that waiting to be explored.

We, as a profession, just have to convince them that these ideas are worth being explored.

The healthcare payment system shapes healthcare.  It certainly has shaped the way we operate in EMS. The pressure to do only what we’re going to get paid to do is so prevalent a force in the industry that it is almost the very foundation of what we do and how we’ve evolved. The payment system didn’t evolve to meet our potential; EMS has evolved to fit its limiting influence. This is why we do the BLS transfers that cost too much for too little benefit. This is why new products that can’t be reimbursed aren’t making their way into the hands of field providers. This is why treatment modalities aren’t expanding as fast as in other areas of medicine. The CMS fee schedule dictates all of this.

And we as a profession have to change it.

Imagine what EMS would be today if we could bill for any service we thought provided benefit to our patients and our communities? To be sure, this would cause some “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the initial phases… but that exists in today’s system. Could you imagine if Community Paramedicine was fully reimbursed? Can you imagine that if instead of providing a wait-and-return BLS transport for a nursing home patient needing a surgical wound re-check, you came, assessed, took some pictures on a cell phone camera and sent it to the physician wirelessly? Can you imagine if you could charge for responding, assessing a patient with a minor medical complaint, and then having the patient transported to an urgent care center that would continue your care? Can you imagine how different everything we do could be?

Well, at least I can start to imagine. I see additional revenue streams that would come into our industry and improve the profession, strengthen our patient care, and save the healthcare system a boatload of money while improving access to primary healthcare. I see paramedics and EMTs not being taxi drivers. I see a real career and a bigger impact upon the overall health of our communities. I see more fiscal responsibility. I see lots of great potential.

And I don’t know how to do this yet, but maybe somewhere, someone reading this might have an idea.

Do you?

————————————————-

I’ve written on this before, and maybe you’d be interested in reading some of those ideas:

“What is the next ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ of EMS 2.0 and US Healthcare Reform?”

And to look at a real-life example of how our British brethren are handling this issue and are having success across the pond:

“A Shoutout Across the pond to our British Brethren”

Posted by on March 17, 2011 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, change, EMS, ems 2.0, EMS Management, EMS Topics, Funding & Staffing, new perspective, Paramedic, paramedic salary, politics, potential, profession, Uncategorized, universal healthcare, US economy

EMS 12-lead Case – Ischemia and Failure

8 comments

If you haven’t been to www.EMS12Lead.com, Tom Bouthillet’s wonderful EMS educational blog… well then I’m going to just come out and say this:

What are you doing here when you should be over there reading his stuff??

Considering how Tom dwarfs my humble traffic numbers (which is something I always kind of knew he did, but didn’t really know how much until I had a few drinks with him at EMS Today and weaseled his numbers out of him) I’ve figured that I’m going to have to do something. I’m going to straight up steal his shtick and write an “educational” EMS 12-lead EKG post of my very own for your reading enjoyment and educational purposes. Heck, I might even be able to make a point or two. Let’s find out.

I keep an archive of interesting tidbits from my EMS career locked up in a vault in my basement and among the oddities and whatnot I have a binder full of 12-leads. I blew the dust off of the old tome and pulled the EKG that I’m using for this story out of the archives. Oh my, this was a doozy. As always with my stories about patients, I may not have ran this one myself and even if I did, I don’t remember where it was that I ran it nor do I remember the age, location, or even the gender of the patient in question. I also have taken the liberty of lying about all of that stuff just to make it even more confusing and difficult for me to write. So, if you think I’m violating the female Hippo, you’re mistaken.

As I recall, the call was toned out with the dispatch information of a “64yo M Pt unable to breathe”. It wasn’t a long distance away and Our Intrepid Paramedic (OIP) responded in a response vehicle being followed up by an ambulance which arrived shortly after He did. It was a nice, well kept residence and the wife of the Pt let OIP in the door as he entered the home. She indicated that the Pt was in a back bedroom of the house and motioned down the hallway. OIP made the trek and found the Pt sitting upright on his bed, Conscious, Alert, and Oriented times 3 (CAOx3) with somewhat increased work of breathing. The patient stated that he had been experiencing pain that he indicated began at the level of his mandible and continued to his epigastrum (his Jaw to his Gut). He stated that the pain had simply become too much for him this evening and that it became very hard to breathe when he laid down for bed. A good look at him was all it really took for OIP to make a working diagnosis after feeling the patent’s weak and irregular radial pulse and pale, cool, and moist skin. OIP placed the patient on 6-LPM oxygen via Nasal Cannula and told the ambulance medic to break out a 12-lead. The initial rhythm strip showed a sinus bradycardia with an IVCD and lots of multifocal ectopy, including multifocal couplets and triplets. The 12-lead was no better. It showed bad, bad mojo. This poor guy was sick.

EEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeek

As the ambulance crew was packaging up on the stretcher to take the Patient to the ambulance, OIP had a few moments to speak with the patient’s wife. She told OIP that the patient had been experiencing pain in his jaw for the last week. She also told OIP that the patient had gone to see his Primary Care physician two days prior and had been told to take advil for the pain in his jaw. She told OIP about how the patient had been very lethargic lately and about how he would become winded when taking out the garbage and walking even shorter distances. She told OIP about how the pain had been getting steadily worse… and also how the doctor said he was fine.

And with a symptom profile of exertional fatigue, difficult breathing, jaw pain,  substernal chest pain, and diaphoresis… what doctor wouldn’t say that… right? Oh wait… hopefully most of them.

The patient wasn’t having a heart attack… he had been having a heart attack for days and now the damage had been done. This was a clear case of the patient not being educated to the symptoms of a heart attack… or of ignoring them in the hopes that they’d just go away. The physician did not obtain a 12-lead nor do lab work and did not diagnose the problem as being cardiac ischemia (Heart attack) when the patient presented for care.

But OIP did… about 2 minutes after meeting the patient he woke up the cardiologist and the cath lab team at a hospital a half-hour’s drive away to help take care of the man. You’ve seen the 12-lead above. It indicates a heart that is in serious trouble. The patient was treated per protocol, which included high-flow o2, bilateral IVs, NTG tablets and paste, and I’m not sure what else the ambulance paramedic did because OIP didn’t accompany the patient to the hospital. That,  and it was too long ago for me to remember what happened… I just know the patient made it there alive to find out whatever his prognosis was going to be from the cardiology team at the ER.

Here’s the deal, once this patient called the ambulance, his care was stellar. OIP and the other EMTs did a fantastic job at rapid recognition, appropriate stabilizing care, and swift transport to an appropriate care facility as none of the local hospitals had the capacity to care for this guy. The EMS people did what they were trained, equipped, and supposed to do. The problem is they were called way too late to make much of a difference in the patient’s continuing quality of life.

I can understand that patients don’t necessarily know when they’re having a heart attack. To a layperson, jaw pain and fatigue could just be the flu. Chest pain could just be heartburn, and exertional dyspnea could just mean that a person has been “pushing themselves too hard lately”. All of those symptom profiles could mean any number of things… but they could also be a heart attack. I can understand how people want to think that they’re not having a heart attack. I get that no one wants to have one. They’re not fun and we as a society may hype them up too much so that people think there is a stigma to the diagnosis. I don’t know if that statement is true, but it sure seems that way sometimes to me.

What I can’t understand is how a patient can present for treatment at a physician’s office with clear symptoms of cardiac ischemia (heart attack) and not be checked for it. I’d like to think that a paramedic would rule it out first and foremost… and I don’t understand why someone wouldn’t.

Then again, I don’t know the information the physician was working with. Perhaps the patient wasn’t honest with his symptoms and tried to minimize what was going on. That’s possible too, as this patient was a proud man who has lived his life like he could handle anything. People do that. Nobody wants to be sick.

The lesson here is to have a high index of suspicion. Patients sometimes minimize their symptoms, and sometimes they over-dramatize them. Some people don’t want to be sick… and some people want to be sicker than they are. I personally will buy into false drama from someone who’s not as sick as they want to be than chance missing the minimized symptoms of someone who’s sicker. I tell my patients that as a paramedic my job is to “Treat for the Worst, and hope for the best.”

But for this guy, OIP never got the chance. This was too late for that. The damage had been done.

This patient’s quality of life was greatly impacted by the fact that he didn’t call 911 at the first signs of his illness. Had he done so, his prognosis would be much different. A quick exam, 12-lead, and appropriate care would have made this guy’s story quite a bit different. Where was the failure? Was it the patient’s fault for not recognizing and/or minimizing his symptoms? Was it the fault of “health education” in general for not reaching the patient in a manner in which he could understand? Does the fault lie with OIP for not spending enough time educating the public about the symptoms and danger of heart attacks? Does the fault lie with this patient’s doctor for missing the diagnosis and/or not providing proper education beforehand?

I don’t know the answer to the above question either. I just know that OIP and the EMS team treated him well once the call came in. I just wish that something different would have happened in the chance of events that lead up to all of this. It would have made the above 12-lead a lot different.

Be vigilant out there.

Posted by on March 15, 2011 • Filed under: EKG, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS Topics, EMS training, Paramedic, paramedic education, patient care, Patient Management, physician, Uncategorized

Thinking about the ones that got away… at Midnight on a Wednesday

2 comments

A conversation I had tonight with a very good friend of mine made me think of two older posts that you may not have read. They’re… well they’re very personal posts, but I still read them from time to time when I need to put stuff in my head other than the crap that usually floats around in there these days. Replacing over-thought-about current sadness with past sadness? Who knows if that’s healthy, but sometimes it just has to happen.

Anyway, these two posts are worth a read I think, if you don’t mind an old medic rambling about people he didn’t save in years past.

Thanks, friend. I needed to think about these things tonight.

My first… – My very first cardiac arrest patient

In an Instant – A perspective on a tragic death of a young person after years on the street

Maybe I’ll elaborate on these posts tomorrow… tonight’s not the night for it. I’m on duty and the bunk is calling. Who knew that I’d be shaped so much by my career? It is nights like these where I’m sure that I’m motivated to be a paramedic by things way more important than money… Not that I’ve ever been not sure of that fact… and not that there’s ever really been enough money to convince me otherwise.

Anyway, enjoy the above links. They’re in my brain tonight. I hope you like them.

Posted by on February 24, 2011 • Filed under: bad calls, cpr, cpr fail, Emergency Medical Services, emotions, EMS, EMS Health & Safety, EMS Topics, EMT, Fire Rescue Topics, Line of Duty, Paramedic, Uncategorized

Remebering My Father, Chief Richard A. Kaiser

5 comments

I was walking out of a nursing home last night after a simple transport when my brother sent me a text. We talk fairly often; my brother and I, so this wasn’t very significant… except for this text said “11 years today, RIP Richard Kaiser.”

And I hadn’t remembered.

Has it really been 11 years? Did my father, Chief Richard Kaiser really pass away 11 years ago? 11 years? Eleven? Years? Has it been that long?

My dad passed away in his sleep, the cause of death being listed as cardiac arrest of an unknown cause. He probably was a victim of Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA), possibly precipitated by a heart attack (MI) that he either wasn’t aware he was having, or didn’t report that he was having. My educated guess is that my father ignored chest pain. If I had to guess about my father, the proud, healthy and vigorous man that he was, I would say that he probably felt some chest pain and ignored the symptoms. I’d guess that he believed, as so many of my patients through the years have believed, that his body wasn’t telling him anything important when he chose to go to bed and see how he felt in the morning. I’d guess that he had been experiencing the pain in his chest all day and didn’t choose to do anything about it.

My father was a volunteer Fire Chief in the small town I grew up in for well over a decade. The department and the community there still benefit greatly from his legacy. He owned the hardware store in town, was the president of the town’s small water company, and was the general fix-it man for many of our community members when they needed something done. He was always willing to help out anyone in need and was a genuine example of a genuinely good man. I benefit greatly from having his example to lead me in my own life and I am blessed to have had him for the twenty years that I did. I will always be thankful for his legacy and the path he left me to follow.

I’m a career paramedic and firefighter and I would say that it is probably him that got me interested in the Fire Service, which blossomed into my love of the Emergency Medical Services. Without his lead, I don’t know if I would have gravitated to the ambulance game. Perhaps my bank account would have benefited more so if I had chosen to adopt his entrepreneurial spirit, or even maybe his MacGyver-Like ability to look at something and make it fixed… but I took on his love of helping people. In fact, as his legacy I’ve tried to impart in the kid that I consider to be my own son that “Our family helps people”… and a lot of that comes from my dad.

After he died, I lead an unsuccessful attempt to place AEDs throughout the part of the county where we lived. The area is very rural. In fact, the town I grew up in, Edgington, IL, is an unincorporated bump-on-the-map surrounded by vast amounts of corn and cows. There isn’t even a post-office. The ambulance that responded was actually the first ambulance I ever ran a call in, and it came from 13 miles away staffed with EMT-Basics. An EMT did respond direct to the scene from her house and began CPR, but she wasn’t equipped with a defibrillator… and ALS care was coming from the city 30 miles away. I was an EMT then but I wasn’t home.

Needless to say, when someone drops dead out in that area, they tend to stay that way.

Since my father passed away at age 53, most probably from ignoring pain in his chest, I have been hyper-vigilant on diagnosing and treating heart attacks and chest pain. As a paramedic, my number one pet-peeve is patients who ignore the symptoms of a heart attack and don’t call 911. Trying to “Tough it out” cost me my father. It cost my father his life, and I have got to tell you… there are times in my life since where I really have wished I had him around to talk to. I have tried to stop questioning how different my life would have turned out had my father simply chosen to call 911 and get his symptoms checked out. I have come to terms with the fact that it was his time and that we can’t second-guess or play “what-if”. I’ve even reconciled my feelings that I can’t always be there for everyone all the time, no matter how much I may have wanted to be.

But people who ignore chest pain and other serious medical symptoms simply because they believe they’re tough or that it can’t be happening to them still bug me. My ambulance partners will tell you, I give these people “the speech” where I expound upon the fact that they should always call 911 for chest pain. Sometimes I even get through to them.

In remembrance of my father, Chief Richard A. Kaiser of the Andalusia/Edgington Volunteer Fire Protection District, I am asking each and every one of my readers to do me a favor. Please spend some time evangelizing to your friends, family, and other loved ones that they should never ignore chest pain or other symptoms of a heart attack. Tell them to learn the symptoms and make the call to 911 when they have them. You do the same for yourself. Don’t try to tough it out or do anything stupid like that…

Because I miss my dad.

Call 911 for chest pain. Just FREAKING do it.

If you’d like to share something on your Facebook pages, twitter accounts, or print something out and pass it to your friends, please click on this link: “Heart Attack? Call 911 – Don’t Just Burp” It’s a piece where I write about the same topic… just without this level of emotion behind it. I’d like that piece to go as far around as it can go. If my father’s legacy can save any more lives, this is one of those ways.

Rest in Piece Dad, I love you. Thanks to you all in advance for helping me spread the word.

Posted by on February 17, 2011 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, American Heart Association, Command & Leadership, cpr, Emergency Medical Services, emotions, EMS, ems 2.0, EMS Topics, EMT, fire, Fire Rescue Topics, In the Line of Duty, Line of Duty, Paramedic, Patient Management, STEMI, volunteer fire department

Heart Attack? Call 911 – Don’t just burp

7 comments

“I’m just sore… I must have pulled a muscle in my chest or something.”

“I keep taking these antacids, but they’re defective or something. They aren’t working like they should.”

“I have drank like 5 sodas… if I could only belch I would feel so much better!”

If you’ve been in the EMS business long enough I’ll bet you have heard those exact words before from different people in disparate situations. They’re describing the uncomfortable feeling their having, and not the one they’re sure they’re not actually feeling in their chests. They’re describing to you the uncomfortable feeling they’re having within their psyche. They’re describing fear. They’re describing doubt. They’re describing the hope they want to have that they’re not actually feeling pain in their chests. They don’t want to be having something wrong with their hearts. They don’t want to be having a HEART ATTACK. This couldn’t be happening to them… this can’t be. They’re sorry they bothered you with a silly 911 call. They didn’t want to have all this fuss made for them by the ambulance and the fire truck and the police officers and the ER staff and the Doctors. This is all just so silly! Can’t we all just understand that if they could only belch that they’d feel better?

But, unfortunately that’s just not the case. That won’t be their path. That won’t be happening for them today. Today, they’re having a myocardial infarction and they’ve got a blocked artery in their heart that is causing it to tell them something… they just don’t want to listen. Honestly, the artery in their heart has been narrowing for a while now, they’ve just been ignoring the warning signs and not taking care of the problem for so long that their heart is becoming annoyed with them. Today, it is getting downright angry at them. Soon, their heart might just become “Pissed Off” and go on strike if they ignore what it’s telling them. Today it’s screaming at them and they’re still trying to do just that… They want to ignore the feeling they’re having, but now they’re scared and they’re starting to bargain. They don’t want to be someone who’s having a heart attack. This can’t happen to them. They don’t have heart attacks. That is something they’re worried about happening to other people, you know… people who aren’t them.

And yet the pain is there. It’s constant. They can’t seem to shake it or rationalize it away. Belching won’t help, and neither will taking antacids, drinking water, stretching, breathing deeply, or calling their friends to ask them about it. The pain, the weird feeling, the sickness, the dread… it’s not stopping and now it has been going on for hours.

And now? Now it is getting worse.

Fear creeps into these patients quickly but still they deny that anything is really wrong. When finally they present for treatment, whether by driving themselves to an urgent care center, by calling their doctor, or by even going to the local emergency room, they’re always shocked and in denial when they’re told “This could be a heart attack”. They defensively react and think that the medical care that is being “forced upon” them is “stupid” or unnecessary, or is “Just too much fuss”. They will still try to not believe it… well, part of them will try. They usually maintain a front. They don’t want to know that they could be indeed having a HEART ATTACK and that now is the time they need to trust the medical profession more so than they ever have trusted it in their life. They can’t fix this on their own, they can’t wish the pain away, and they can’t self heal the problem. By this time… no rationalization or self-healing thing will work. They need hard, conventional medical care… and they need it now.

As a paramedic, I have seen the type of patient I’ve described above many, many times. I have diagnosed acute myocardial infarctions in multitudes of patients who were angry at me for bestowing even the possibility of the diagnosis of “Heart Attack” upon them. Some have sworn at me, some have been relieved when I believed them, and all were scared. As a paramedic, I can diagnose and begin treatment on many types of cardiac conditions that fall into the “Heart Attack” category people fear so much. Paramedic and Ambulance care in the first stages of a heart attack can make a huge difference in how bad it gets and how much damage is prevented. Ambulance care during a heart attack saves not only lives, but it saves muscle. Consider the fact that during a heart attack, 1% of heart muscle is lost EVERY MINUTE it is left untreated. EMS can intervene, make a working diagnosis, and provide treatment and medications that will help slow or stop the damage.

And people really just need to forget about doing anything else other than calling 911 when they may be having one.

Really, if you’re even the least bit concerned that you could be having a heart attack, you should drop everything and just call 911. Don’t call your mom, your son, your friend, your spouse, or even your doctor. Call 911. Don’t do anything else… call 911 and just sit there. Someone in an ambulance will show up that knows what they’re doing. They’ll help you and you need their help. Now is the time to trust them and to let them do their job. Don’t ignore the pain, don’t worry about bothering them, and don’t feel bad for asking for help. You need an ambulance. They’re the best thing for you.

As a paramedic or EMT who is presented with a patient like this, you have a hard job. Not only must you provide appropriate diagnosis and treatment, but you also have to convince the patient to believe you and allow appropriate care. Reading a 12-lead EKG is easy compared to telling the patient and their family that you must bypass the closest hospital that they want to go to in favor of taking them to a bigger hospital, farther away, that has the cardiac surgery capabilities and cardiology services that they really need. This is the time to become a politician. This is the time to earn trust. This is the time that your skills as a caring and compassionate healthcare provider are going to be put to the test.

And if everyone stopped ignoring the problem and trusted their feelings, a lot of lives would be saved.

In the community that I serve, it is actually better medicine for a person having a heart attack to call 911 than it is for them to present to the emergency room. Even if that person immediately presents to the ER at the first warning sign of a heart attack, the ambulance still would have provided better care for them. Today’s ambulances bring appropriate care and highly trained medical professionals right to the patient’s side. Paramedics and EMTs can recognize the signs, help rule out mimics of a heart attack, perform diagnostic tests and an EKG, and can begin treatment with medications that stop, slow down, or even reverse the damage to the heart tissue in progress. The paramedics or EMTs in the ambulance can communicate with cardiologists and ER physicians at the local facilities and have a system in place to bring patients having a heart attack right into the facilities best prepared to take care of them, bypassing facilities that cannot provide the surgical intervention they may need… right away. Being immediately and appropriately treated by a paramedic and the emergency cardiology team early enough in a heart attack can make it almost seem like no big deal.

And that’s what we all want our heart attacks to be if and when we have one: No big deal.

So I’m telling you all out there. Don’t guess, don’t rationalize, and don’t hope it will go away. At the very first realization that the feeling you’re having, the pain, the ache, the soreness, the unusual heartburn, or however you describe it may be a heart attack; Call 911. Then sit and wait for us. We promise we won’t be mad if it’s something less serious.

But you’ll feel better, much better, no matter what it is.

Please, just call 911.

Posted by on February 9, 2011 • Filed under: Ambulance, attack, Emergency Medical Services, Emergency room, EMS, EMS Topics, letter to the editor, Paramedic, Public relations, STEMI

Does How Your Brain Works Affect Your Patient Care?

8 comments

Hey everyone, before you read the post below, watch this video. This is part of a test:

Now, after you have watched the above video and reacted to it in some way, read the following humorous statement:

“Some helium floats into a bar. The bartender says “We don’t serve noble gasses here!” The helium doesn’t react.”

(Ok, if you’re not a nerd.. The noble gasses (of which helium is one of) are non-reactive. Ha!)

Which one of those two things made you laugh harder, if at all? Did you have a positive or negative reaction to either of them? Both?

The reason I ask this, is because I told my partner that joke about the helium today. His reaction: “Wow… All that knowledge and you still can’t tile your bathroom floor.” He came to EMS after being a contractor and working in the trades. You know, doing stuff that you have to do with your hands. I did too, honestly, since I pretty much grew up on a farm with a father who owned a hardware store. So you’d think I’d be handier than I actually am. I can fix things, sure… but I certainly couldn’t build a house. That’s just not how my brain works.

Years ago, while working in an emergency room I overheard two physicians having a discussion about another ER physician who was very popular with his coworkers and patients. This doctor was friendly, jovial, kind, and nice. I liked him quite a bit and was a little weary of the other two docs talking about him. They talked about how nice this other doctor was to all of his patients and how they wished they could have him follow them around to all of their own patients and be the “nice” doctor who made their patients feel better while they attended simply to the cold, hard realities of their patient’s medical needs. Their solution was that a happy medium could not be reached, and that a healthcare provider was either “too nice and incompetent” or “competent, but a jerk”.

And today, after my coworker brought up the severe need for a new tile floor in my bathroom, I thought back to that conversation. He and I are both paramedics. While I’m more experienced and have been a paramedic for more than a decade longer than he, He and I both take care of the same types of patients with the same types of complaints and make similar results. We follow the same standing medical orders and work under the same medical director in the same ambulances. However, since his brain works so very differently than does mine, how can we possibly achieve the same results?

People choose their physicians based upon their personalities as much as they do anything. They want to develop trust in their doctor, and the interpersonal relationship between doctor and patient on outcomes has been widely speculated upon and researched. I wonder if the same phenomenon exists within EMS. Does the way our personalities, experiences, strengths, weaknesses, and other traits affect our patient outcomes? If my brain is wired so very differently from my partners, how does that affect his patients’ care over my own?

I don’t have the answer to the questions I’ve asked here, but I’ve become pretty curious about this over the last hour or so. To help answer the question of what personality type you think makes the best type of paramedic or EMT, I ask you to write your opinion in the comment section below. I think that we might get some pretty darn interesting answers. 

Be sure to put which humorous thing you most enjoyed above somewhere in the comment.

(Oh, and so two Atoms were walking down the street. One said “Oh no! I’ve lost an electron!” to which the other replies “Are you positive??”)

 (Also, my friend with the Ph D in chemistry said that the helium joke was “A real ARGON-er” – Get it? Ha! Nerd humor is nerdy)

Posted by on January 19, 2011 • Filed under: Emergency Medical Services, EMS, ems education, EMS Humor, EMS Topics, EMS training, Fire Rescue Topics, inside the mind of a paramedic, Paramedic, paramedic education

Assessing Greatness – Catching the stuff you’re supposed to

4 comments

What the heck is wrong with this guy!? You just can’t figure this one out and your patient seems to be crashing before your eyes. You were originally called for the “Unconscious unknown” at a party house frequented by college students and found the 28 or so year-old male unresponsive. Everything you check seems to be a dead end. His heart rate is fine, but slowing… His respirations are adequate but you’re certainly considering getting out the bag-valve-mask… You’re popped your line and given 2 full milligrams of Narcan but that hasn’t had any response. His pupils are PERRL but sluggish. His skin is pale, cool, and moist but not diaphoretic… and there doesn’t seem to be any trauma. Everything with this guy is a dead end treatment wise and you decide that this guy simply needs to be treated with diesel. You have your partner hop up front, turn on the twinkles and the woo-woos and beat feet to the hospital. All the way you check and recheck, trying to figure out if you can fix this guy. Unfortunately, you don’t make any headway before you reach the ER.

After you finish cleaning and restocking the truck to return to service from the ER you walk past the patient’s room on your way to get a cup of coffee. You’re shocked to see that the patient is sitting up, is alert and talking, and seems to be doing just fine. Incredulously, you ask the nurse what happened. She asks you what the reading you got for the patient’s blood sugar in the field was, and before your mouth can speak, all of the voices in your head seem to scream at you in unison “Holy Flying Pig Tarts!!” you forgot to check the patient’s blood sugar, thinking that it was most probably a narcotic overdose. The ER didn’t however, and found that the patient’s blood glucose was 20.

Have we all been there? Can we just admit that we all have found ourselves in this or a similar situation at least once or twice in our storied careers? As much as I am ashamed to admit it, I have found myself in similar situations where it seems I just messed up and left out an important part of my assessment. Somehow, something important like taking a quick blood glucose reading on an unresponsive is going to slip your mind somewhere in your career and in your adventures in the field and it’s going to bite both you and your patient in the hindquarters. Mistakes, or rather oversights like this are all too common in all branches of medicine because we as the healthcare professionals are simply human beings trying to absorb and process way too many pieces of information at once.

Much has been decried about the practice of “Defensive Medicine” where healthcare providers, mostly physicians, order unnecessary tests simply to avoid missing an obscure case and being sued because of it. People are constantly irradiated for unnecessary X-Rays, CT scans, and other such tests or so say the detractors of these practices. They say that it exposes patients to unnecessary testing, causes a false sense of security, and drives up the costs of healthcare exponentially. Popular culture has even jumped on the bandwagon, with the heroes of popular medical dramas coming out against the practice and being regarded as cowboys or mavericks. The public then eats it up… until they have a headache and don’t get a CT scan to ease their worried nerves.

However, not all practice of defensive medicine is a bad thing and in fact, in EMS I believe that this practice can be a good thing. I have long believed in my career and in my professional paramedic practice that every patient deserves a thorough and standardized assessment. Sure, I am pretty darn good at coming up with my working diagnosis based upon my solid initial assessment with a few secondary and tertiary assessment tricks to narrow in on the diagnosis and get my differentials, but the foundation remains the same. Everybody gets the same head to toe assessment. I’ve standardized it so that I don’t miss anything… or at least that I don’t miss as much as is possible not to miss. Standardizing your assessment and performing the same assessment on every patient every time becomes a security blanket and helps keep your assessment skills sharp with every call. Sure, it may seem silly to listen to lung sounds on a patient with a twisted ankle, or to check pupil reaction on the finger amputation, but you don’t have to let the patient know you’re doing it. Just look at them. Make sure you hit every high point in your standardized assessment with every patient, and you’ll catch a lot more zebras than you’ll miss.

In addition, there are some ground rules that I follow with certain types of patients and those fancy diagnostic tools that they give us to play with. First and foremost, if they say that skin condition, color, temperature, and moisture is the fourth vital sign, then blood-glucose level is the fifth. Sure, not every patient needs a lancet poked into their finger to have the machine read the number, but certainly every patient with an altered level of consciousness does. Even if you think the cause of the patient’s condition is something else, like the patient I had the other shift who was hypotensive and septic with a high fever, check it anyway… because the patient in the above example had a blood glucose of 40mg/dl and responded quite well to some fluid and the D-50 I gave him. Other patients who may not need to be poked can still have hyper of hypoglycemia ruled out by asking them their bladder habits (hyperurination), their last oral intake (Have they eaten enough not to be hypoglycemic) and other sugary questions.

Then, there’s the 12-lead. Can I just say that I see darn near close to zero reason that every patient who gets into an ambulance cannot get a 12-lead EKG done on them? To be sure, I don’t give every patient a 12-lead… but for anything that could be even remotely cardiac related I will perform one. Lethargy? Check. Flu like symptoms? Check. Syncope or near-to-it? Check and Check. It takes only a few minutes to perform and you can really make a difference in a patient’s overall healthcare pathway and well being by taking a symptomatic 12-lead tracing and starting the trend of monitoring. Before we all had the tool (Sorry Chicago… you should be catching up with the rest of the world soon) just how many ischemic cardiac events went undetected?

The crime here lies firmly in the realm of the underassessment, not in overassessing. The patient assessment is the cornerstone of everything we do and takes priority to all but the airway, breathing, and circulatory status of all patients. Making sure to be thorough and methodical in your assessment practices saves not only lives, but your own butt in the process. You cannot over assess just as you cannot overeducate yourself as to what potential findings mean. Just as an EMT basic can ask the same questions as the most seasoned paramedic, they can also ask the same questions as an ER doctor with the proper self education.

EMS needs to see itself as playing a role in the overall healthcare system and in the final care pathways for the patients we treat. Becoming an expert at the patient assessment is a big role in this. Remember, you’re the person who sees the patient in the first stages of their acute illness and in their entry into the healthcare system. Your thorough assessment goes a long way into the wellbeing of every patient you touch. Be great at it.

Posted by on January 13, 2011 • Filed under: Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS Topics, EMS training, Paramedic, paramedic education, Patient Management, Training & Development

A Shoutout Across the Pond to our British EMS Bretheren

6 comments

Mark in his British Paramedic Uniform

If you don’t know Mark Glencorse by now, you’re either very new to the EMS blogosphere or have been living under a rock. In addition to being a fine paramedic by all accounts, Mark runs the EMS blog www.999medic.com which is a member of the www.FireEMSblogs.com family of which I also am a member. Mark has a comfortable, familiar style of writing that brings you right there next to him as you read his articles. It’s almost like you’re running the calls with him, experiencing the joys and pain of a British Paramedic as he experiences them himself. He’s one of my Best Blogger Buddies and I’m proud that I can call him a friend. I read most everything he writes.

I hadn’t been to his blog for a few days though and thought that today would be a good time to catch up on what he’s been writing. He’s got some good stuff up lately, but in addition to some of his more educational articles, I found some things that just floored me.

We here in the United States can learn quite a bit from our brethren across the pond. They have aspects to their system that could be very valuable for us here in the states. Their EMS system is similar to ours in a lot of ways, not the least of which is the fact that they respond to largely the same types of calls that we do, but is also vastly different in terms of initial education, pay, respect, and capabilities.

I’m going to explore three of his recent posts here and see if other fellow US paramedics and EMTs will be just as floored as I was. Here goes:

“The Clash of the Assessments” – 999medic.com

This post explores some friction that he and his fellow paramedics have been having with “Walk In Centers” (WICs) that have sprouted up all over his country. He describes these clinics as such:

“In the UK over the last few years, we have seen hundreds of NHS Walk in Centres (WIC) sprout up around the country. These are primarily Nurse led units that are placed strategically in various towns and cities to provide care for those residents who are suffering from either minor injury or illness. They most definitely have a place in the wider primary health care environment, but ask any Medic what they think of them, and most will tell stories of picking up patients from the Walk In Centre to take up to the Accident and Emergency department who clearly do not have any specific life threatening or emergent need, and who, in the paramedics opinion should have been treat and discharged from the Walk in Centre.”

This sounds pretty familiar to me. Here in the US we have plenty of Urgent Care Centers that have sprouted up all over the American Healthcare landscape. They are staffed sometimes by a Physician, but are largely staffed by Physicians’ Assistants (PA-Cs) and Nurse Practitioners (ARNPs). They handle minor medical complaints and urgent-but-not-emergent medical conditions. Most of these centers are perfectly adequate for treating most patients with day-to-day illnesses and minor injuries. They cost much less than an emergency room visit and help save the ER from having to handle all of these minor cases. I fully support urgent care centers and their use in the spectrum of healthcare. However, my fellow medics and I can all point to times where we’ve responded to urgent care centers for complaints that we did not believe to warrant an emergency response and subsequent transport. I can emphasize with Mark and his coworkers about their problem with these kinds of transports.

Here’s what Mark describes as the “Rant” he’s trying not to have:

“My service has direct referral pathways to the Walk in Centres. If I have a patient who I think fits the fairly strict criteria for assessment and treatment at a WIC, then I can contact one of the nurse partitioners on the phone and discuss my patient so that they know what I am bringing in and more importantly that they know they are suitable for their level of care and will not need to be shipped out to the A&E department at a later time.”

Wait… What?

“My service has direct referral pathways to the Walk In Centres”

Dude!! We have been practically begging for that here in the US for some time! That’s AWESOME that the British can do that! Alternate treatment and transport pathways are one of the cornerstone ideas for EMS 2.0. This practice would save a great deal of healthcare dollars, would lessen the burden on the overcrowded ERs, would be remarkably more convenient for the patient, and would help keep the ERs available for the more serious of illnesses and injuries. This is a slam-dunk that we here in the US just can’t seem to figure out for ourselves and here we see the program is already active in the UK. We should steal that data and use it to help justify our own programs.

The next two articles I’m going to explore are pretty entertaining. Mark was selected to ride along in a multi-disciplinary unit of both civilian and military police officers in a busy urban center that has been having problems with alcohol and young people trying to mix too often. The set-up is pretty cool. He rides around with the police officers, helps them with what he is able to help them with, and is available to handle any medical problems that might arise with a 2 to 3 minute response time. The program sounds great, actually and I think that it could probably be employed with some success in many areas of the US… but read this account of his first EMS call while with the PD:

Mark (Right) with the rest of the British Team

“Less than a minute later, a police van turns up outside of a bar, the side door slides open, and out jumps a paramedic!” (Apparently it’s novel for the Police to be around with the Paramedics there)

“After a few quizzical looks, I get on with doing my usual job and assess the patient. He has a small cut to his forehead where someone punched him whilst wearing a ring. It is a minor wound but will need either stiching or gluing. There was no loss of consciousness, he has no other apparent injury and his observations are fine. Its still early in the night and he has only had a couple of drinks and doesn’t appear intoxicated.”

Man… so the patient is drunk and has a head injury… All you US paramedics know what that means. Here comes an ambulance in to transport the patient to the hospital. He can’t refuse because of the ETOH on board coupled with the head injury, and you know you don’t want to be sued… Let’s see what Mark did:

“I advise him that he needs to be assessed at the local hospital so that the wound can be closed. After dressing his forehead, he promptly jumps into a waiting taxi and heads off to the hospital less than 10 minutes away. I complete my paper work, Dave completes his log and we are off again.”

“From time of call to patient leaving scene – 8 minutes!”

WHAT!? OH COME ON NOW! That’s just not fair! You mean to tell me that Mark was able to use his clinical judgment, assess the guy for his injuries, and make a common-sense treatment and transport decision? He put the guy in a Taxi??

That would be a potentially career-ending move for a US paramedic. The Brits do it regularly. Could you just imagine what the ability to make those kind of decisions would mean for the US EMS system? Could you just Imagine what that would mean for EMS 2.0?

Let’s see what happens with the next patient encounter he describes:

“As we are sitting outside one of the shops, Dave hears one of the door staff calling for police assistance. He has been assaulted and has a head injury.”

“Again we are on scene in less than two minutes. This time the wound is a bit worse and is still freely bleeding. A dressing, some direct pressure and a quick assessment later and he is sitting next to me in the back of the police van whilst we drive him the short 5 minute journey to the local hospital. Again, no need for an ambulance, just transport to the hospital. In this case, and many others, the team are happy to use the police van instead of calling an ambulance into the town centre. It is a real benefit having the hospital so close to the centre of the town!”

“Even though we transported this patient to the hospital, we were again back in the town centre and patrolling in under 20 minutes from the time of the call.”

Apparently this is British Medical Control

So he brought the guy to the hospital in the Police car. Actually I’m familiar with the fact that they do this over there. Mark is regularly staffed to what they call a “Rapid Response Car” which is part of their “Front-Loaded Model” where they send a paramedic first to emergency calls to determine what the best course of action would be for the patient. Many times they don’t send an ambulance until the paramedic makes the transport decision. One of those potential decisions is to simply transport patients in the car with them instead of the ambulance.

You can find Part One of “Working A Police Medic Shift” – Here

And you can find Part Two – Here

I’m no fan of socialized medicine, but I have to give credit where credit is due. The US EMS system could learn a lot from the British system and I just can’t get over the fact that so many of the things we speak of for the EMS 2.0 movement here in the US are being done right now by our brothers across the pond. It would stand to reason that we could use the data that they’ve collected and created right now, steal a lot of their ideas, and begin to implement them right here in the good ol’ US of A.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was some kind of “Project” where an a British Paramedic could come to the US and explore the US EMS system? How about where an American Paramedic could come to the United Kingdom and learn about their system?

Oh wait, there is. The Chronicles of EMS has been doing just that very thing. If you’re a regular reader I’m sure you’ve already heard of it. If you’re not familiar with it, you should go right now to www.ChroniclesOfEMS.com and learn about it. It’s an amazing thing done by both Mark Glencorse and Justin “The Happy Medic” Schorr. If you’re an American EMS person, you really need to know about this and show them as much support as you possibly can.

And while you’re at it, check out some of the other fine British EMS Bloggers:

Insomniac Medic – http://insomniacmedic.blogspot.com/

“A Life in the Day of a Basics Doc” – http://basicsdoc.blogspot.com/

Posted by on October 30, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, ems 2.0, EMS Management, EMS Topics, ER, medicblog999, Paramedic, UK paramedics, united kingdom, universal healthcare, US economy, Your Happy Medic

Those Darn Kids!

16 comments

These darn kids and their new-fangled toys!

Hey, at least I aint @FossilMedic 's Age yet.

Call me old fashioned if you want to, but allow me to hike my EMS pants way up higher than my belly button and talk in my Old Grizzled Medic ™ voice for a second here. You see, the kids these days are doing something that just tans my hide. What, with their iPhones, and their iPods, and their iPads, and me with my iGlasses and the Etch-a-Sketch… Confound it! I just don’t understand.

You see, Youngins… back in my day we didn’t have all of these fancy techno-toys that we do now. When it came to running on the ambulance, we made do with what we had and that was the way we liked it. What, with all of the trudging 20 miles to work in the feet of snow uphill with the both ways and whatnot we earned our measly pittances and then trudged back home to our coal-heated shacks to jitterbug away the three hours we got off of work in between our 120 hour shifts. We didn’t need all the pansy stuff you enjoy now.

We did our medical care to the best of our abilities then. We actually had to LIFT our patients into the ambulances on the cot, rather than having the little button lift 700lbs with one finger. We had to look at actual paper maps to find addresses, rather than having the nice lady in the GPS tell us where to go. Heck, we even had to write paper reports on our EMS calls BY HAND USING A PEN.

Paper reports written by hand do one thing and only one thing very well. They suck. They are simply awesome at sucking. They stink on ice. They are medieval torture devices left over from the Monty Python version of the Spanish Inquisition and honestly, the day we switched over to computerized reporting I stabbed a wooden stake through a stack of the dreaded Illinois “Bubble Sheet” EMS report forms. Then I poured gasoline on them, turned around and flicked a match behind my back as I walked away in slow motion without looking back at the explosion and flames. I was wearing sunglasses. It was epic.

It was Just Like This! Only with more geekery and no little girl and I was shirtless...

Paper reports could be documented at the patient’s side but it just always seemed so darn inconvenient to do so. I did it occasionally during long transports, or when we were running back-to-back calls and I wanted to jot down the high-points of each call on the report form so I could accurately remember them when I got the chance to catch up on my paperwork. It wasn’t uncommon to be “down” four or five reports in those days because we were just so dad-gum busy and the reports took so blasted long to `complete. A stack of those paper reports could give you writers’ cramp for days. Especially the Illinois “Bubble Sheet” forms which I used for years, they were awful monstrosities constructed to worship the demon “ScAnTr0nn” who mandated that little bubbles be filled out perfectly for every name, address, and number you scrawled on the form. Those evil little dots cost me hours of my life, a good amount of my hair, and most of my sanity. After using the awful bubble sheets for years, I switched systems to a place that utilized a somewhat less-evil paper report form, and then back to a place that still used the hated bubble sheets, and then Huzzah! To a place that had computers.

Although I must admit that the hand-strength I developed from writing those awful things made my one-handed beer can crushing trick a hit at parties.

The first report I wrote on a computer was a simple little form written on a then state of the art laptop that weighed approximately 17523lbs. It took forever to load, locked up and lost reports frequently, and was an absolute gift from God. Then, the regional EMS system stepped in and put computers in the EMS report rooms at the hospitals because nobody could ever figure out how to hook up their ambulance laptops to the ancient dot-matrix printers they’d provided for us. Those programs were sweet! I hate switching my hand between a mouse and a keyboard 15 times per second to enter data and the reports we used on the desktop were forms I could simply use the keyboard with the whole time. I actually typed faster than the program could keep up and knew just how many times I had to tab through a list to mark the correct spot on the form without seeing it on the screen. I’d end up having the report typed out a few seconds before the machine caught up and put the words on the screen. It. Was. Awesome.

Still, those reports were something that could only be done away from the patient’s side. We all had note pads to jot down info we wanted to put on the report while we were treating the patient and we took those notes to the computer to enter into the report. Nowadays, them kids with their fancy technology have Toughbooks with touch-screens that they use to write their EMS reports and since their invention, I’ve noticed a trend.

It first started when I noticed my medic protégé Chad had a habit of bringing the toughbook in with him to emergency calls. He’d grab the jump kit, the o2 bag, and the computer. Then, while he was interviewing and assessing the patient, he’d be starting their report.

This dismayed me. Again, call me a crazy old coot and an old-fogey… but I believe that we should not only focus 100% on the events of the call and upon what the patient is telling us, but also that we should give the appearance that we are doing so. You just can’t make me believe that a patient is going to feel that we are listening to that which ails them and are paying attention to their needs when we have our nose in a lap-top. Sure, it may save time on the overall reporting process by allowing the EMT to get an early start on the documentation, but it also ends up taking more time on scene to wait for the computer to enter in information. I also think that it takes away the EMTs ability to fully observe everything that is going on with the patient and the scene around them. It robs one of their situational awareness and of the nuances of the patient assessment.

That, and it’s just plain rude.

It bothers me enough that I launched a whole ridicule-based diatribe against my young protégé and shamed him into no longer bringing the computer into calls with him. I have no problem if he begins the report at the patient’s side during transport as long as he has completed everything that needs to be done and he makes sure to monitor the patient thoroughly. That’s cool, I guess. I am glad that he won’t have to suffer the pain of hand-written EMS reporting. That’s a cross us Grizzled Old Medics™ bore for you with honor.

You’re welcome. Now get off my lawn, and STOP USING THE COMPUTER IN FRONT OF THE PATIENT!!

Posted by on October 29, 2010 • Filed under: ambulance humor, ckemtp rants, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS Humor, EMS Topics, EMS training, Fire Rescue Topics, Paramedic, paramedic education, paramedic narrative, patient care, Patient Management, stories, technology-communications-ems-topics, Uncategorized

Primary Care Paramedics? I think it’s time

20 comments

Clinically speaking, there’s a whole lot of medicine out there that I don’t know.

I mean, paramedics like me go though a few thousand hours of training in emergency medical care. We get a few years of classes covering the things we need to know about treating the most common of truly emergent medical conditions. Heart attacks? Check. Strokes? Check. Airway Management and Respiratory Support? Check and Check. We paramedics are experts in the acute medical emergency. If you’re dying, we are well equipped and trained to support you until a doctor and a team of medical people in a hospital can take over your care. If you have a medical emergency somewhere outside of a hospital emergency room, we’re the first people you want to see.

The Medic is In

But, what if you have a particularly nasty case of Strep Throat?

Well… that’s called “Primary Care” and it covers a lot of non-emergent medical conditions. Strep throat hurts and it makes a person feel like crap. The times that I’ve chanced to become infected with a nasty strain of Strep “A” it’s made me feel like a warmed-over Code Brown Sandwich. It sucks being sick and that’s why people go to the doctor. Patients present to doctors’ offices for myriad reasons. Pink Eye, Influenza, the “creeping crud”, bronchitis, and gastrointestinal problems are common occurrences there. When I worked at an urgent care clinic we saw plenty of those. Up to two-hundred patients per day came in with just these kinds of complaints. There were lacerations, fractures, and other kinds of cases that came in too. Rarely did we need to call for an ambulance and while we did sometimes advise people to go to the ER on their own, that was rare as well. A good primary care doctor can catch most minor conditions and adequately treat them right there in the clinic, negating any need for an expensive emergency room.

However, the problem lies in actually getting access to a primary care physician to take care of you when you’re sick.

Yesterday, my mother-in-law (I call her “MIL” for short) called me up. One of the people she works with had an injury to his fingernail. He tore a good part of it clean off while working out in their warehouse. It hurt, of course, and it was bleeding. Their company is a small five person shop that they’re building from the ground up. A Workers’ comp claim would go right against their small and shared pocketbook and start-ups don’t have the cash for that kind of stuff. She wanted to know the proper first-aid for this and was trying to avoid the doctor. He was too. As owner of the company he didn’t want to have to pay for it and a fingernail injury just doesn’t seem all that severe. Still, it hurt and they were worried about infection. The guy understandably wanted proper treatment.

I told him that fingernails either grow back, or they don’t. Eventually it would be fine if he cleaned it with mild soap and water and put a non-adhering bandage over the nail bed to keep it clean and protected. I told him in a day or so to put some Vaseline-based antibiotic cream on it as well to keep it moist and stave off infection.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t practicing medicine without a license. I have my First-Aid Merit Badge from the Boy Scouts of America and that was covered somewhere in there, I’m sure. However, you’re right to think that fingernail injuries aren’t covered anywhere in the National Standard EMT or Paramedic curriculum. We are taught to bandage it up and take it to an Emergency Room.

Yep, if he would have presented to my care on the ambulance, I would have had to transport the guy to the ER for a physician to do what I told him to do. If he refused the $500 (or so) transport fee and the (astronomical) ER fee, I would have had to have him sign an “Against Medical Advice” (AMA) refusal form and could not legally give him any medical advice other than to be transported to the ER.

It’s maddening.

Fingernail guy didn’t have an option for treatment where he was other than to go to the ER. In the area where he was located, there aren’t any Urgent Care facilities. There certainly aren’t any cheap ones anywhere you go, but their cost is much lower than the local ER he was near. He didn’t have an option, so he had his coworker call her son-in-law (SIL) for advice. I gave it, and saved everyone involved a few hundred if not a thousand dollars. Sure, the guy could have called his primary care physician and gotten an appointment a month later… but I would think that as a self-employed small-business owner he probably doesn’t have access to health insurance at a less-than-oppressive cost.

A while back, I wrote the piece “Did I do Good?” regarding what I think EMS 2.0 should become. I think that Paramedics should be educated and empowered to step into the realm of primary care and be able to provide primary care in the field. Now to be sure, as Rogue Medic will point out, there’s evidence that states that Paramedics and EMTs are bad at triage and we are not currently equipped with the right education to provide these services at this time. However, I think that educating a group of excellent paramedics to the proper standards, giving them the proper tools, and empowering them with the proper legal authority could revolutionize healthcare.

Every community has a group of paramedics and/or EMTs and nearly every community (I would say every, but I have no stats in front of me) has less-than-optimal access to primary care across the spectrum of patient populations. To me, there is a clear solution that makes sense. Could Paramedics, once properly educated, equipped, and empowered, provide limited primary care services, appropriate triage, and transfer in the field? How about at fixed sites and clinics? We could follow protocols, utilize tele-medicine, and function much as we do now, but with a much lower-acuity class of patients.

Sure, there are Nurse Practitioners, Physicians’ Assistants, and other healthcare providers that can provide these services, but let them work with us as we work with them. There doesn’t have to be an adversarial relationship. We all have different training and that one set can be used to compliment the other. 

EMS 2.0 is about thinking outside the box for EMS. It’s about finding new ways to face the challenges. Thinking the way we have in the past won’t fix the problems that it failed to fix before. My belief is that with Paramedics providing Primary Care, we would greatly increase access to care, more properly triage patients to the proper healthcare pathways, save gobs and gobs of money, and just might “fix” this whole healthcare mess without all that legislation and legal wrangling.

Any suggestions on where we begin?

Posted by on October 28, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, Command & Leadership, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, ems 2.0, EMS Topics, new perspective, Paramedic, paramedic education, patient care, Patient Management, potential, Training & Development

A Late-Night Rant about Petty Politics in EMS

16 comments

I had to think about a Facebook comment that I just posted on my personal Facebook page. Admittedly, I’m pretty angry right now and I probably shouldn’t be writing. It’s been a long night, you see… and I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with what I’m angry at.

However, this blog is my therapy and I can use it to get some stuff off of my chest whenever I see fit, right? Good, then here goes.

Tonight I’m going to forget that my computer has been acting up on me and has lost two 1000word-plus articles that I was lining up for the end of the week. I’m not even going to mention that I’m behind on a lot of projects because I’ve been overwhelmed with work. I’m not even going to talk about how the workload that I’ve let pile up has been making the blog suffer… Nope. I’m going to jump to the front of the line and bring that Facebook comment right here, to the front of this blog page where a few thousand EMTs and Medics might read it this month.

“Revenue Preservation, Area Preservation, Ego Preservation, and Political Capital Preservation” – These things are the top priorities of some EMS agencies I’ve dealt with over the years. Patient care is on the list, but its way down on the bottom of these agencies’ priorities. Some agencies have their priorities straight, but more it’s more common than I’d like to admit that EMS agencies have those four things at the beginning of this paragraph firmly implanted into their unwritten mission statements.  

I’ve written at length about EMS politics and how I hate them. For example:

-          Is What You Do “The Best You Can Do”

-          Volunteer Fire/EMS – Taking the High Road and Letting Go

-          Two Cases, One Letter: From One Paramedic’s Struggles, Change Can Come

-          Cat Puke Chicken

-          EMS 2.0, Bernoulli, Fluid Dynamics, and Changing the World

-          And Much, Much more…

And tonight, again, I’ve seen yet another example of the worst kind of EMS politics. I’ve seen these situations countless times before and I’ll see them countless times again, I’m afraid. People who don’t put the patient first have missed the whole point to this EMS thing. We’re here for the patient. We’re here for the citizens. There is a selfless aspect to EMS that must be respected in the preservation of the greater good. To miss that for almost any reason is to disrespect not only the foundation that EMS was built upon, but also the foundation of the entire healthcare system.

“First, Do No Harm”

Yea, that’s the first pledge of the Hippocratic Oath, the same one that Physicians take when they become doctors. EMS people are an off-shoot of physicians and we should follow those four words up there as much as they have to. Using the citizens of your jurisdiction as pawns in a political game is to violate those most sacred of oaths. EMS people tend to feud for the flimsiest of forgettable reasons. These feuds escalate unchecked for years until every action taking by the opposing party seems only to reinforce the perceived validity of the petty feud, even when the original actions or inactions that caused the feud were lost to history or died with the people who started the feud to begin with. Often, neighboring squads hate each other for no reason that they can remember. Factions within a single EMS agency may feud internally for no good reason whatsoever. These things escalate and escalate until patients are harmed by them… for no reason at all.

And if there ever has been a reason to harm a patient for a petty feud between services, between cliques, or between individuals, I’ve yet to hear it. In my opinion, using a patient as a pawn in a political game is the worst kind of offense.

These petty EMS politics, these laughable feuds, and the little kingdoms must have the light shown upon them. As I said in my probably politically incorrect Facebook post:

“I don’t like it when Petty People play petty politics with peoples’ lives. Really, people die from the kind of stuff I’m angry at without ever knowing that they were pawns in a political game. EMS politics must be exposed to the light so that the people that play them can be scattered like the cockroaches they are.”

Do you see anything that I’m going to be in trouble for tomorrow when people read that post? Remember, that’s on my personal account… not the blog account. Yes, I do take personal responsibility for everything I say on this blog page or in any of my public speaking or writing for that matter, but there’s a chance that people I know and may or may not have been talking about will read that tomorrow. My guess is that I will be the bad guy for saying it.

And frankly, I don’t care.

As I said in the post that I linked to above, Volunteer Fire/EMS – Taking the High Road and Letting Go – I am willing to bury each and every hatchet I do now hold or have ever held and solemnly pledge to conduct myself in friendship, mutual understanding, and for the good of the ideals in which we all should share. My guess is that there are people out there tonight who should do exactly the same. Don’t let petty politics harm those whom we’re pledged to serve. It’s not about us. It’s about them. It’s about our ideals.
It’s bigger than us. We are more than the sum of our parts. Don’t forget that.

I know that this hasn’t been the most polished piece I’ve ever posted up here, but everything I’ve said I believe. That’s why I’m a blogger. It’s why I’m a paramedic as well. Thanks for letting me rant.

The EMT Oath as adopted by the NAMET

EMTs have an Oath as well...

Posted by on October 27, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, change, ckemtp rants, Command & Leadership, edemse, Emergency Medical Services, emotions, EMS, EMS ethics, EMS Management, EMS rant, EMS Topics, Ethics, everyday ems ethics, Fire Rescue Topics, medical ethics, Paramedic, politics, professionalism, rant, Uncategorized

Back in the Saddle Again!

4 comments

Back when I was a high-school student I was completely enamored with EMS. I just couldn’t wait to slip into a uniform and get out on the streets of an ambulance. While in retrospect maybe I could have refocused the energy I spent researching the EMS gig into something a little more profitable, the sheer amount of stuff I read about EMS in my formative years helps me in my job to this day.

One of the earliest EMS blogs I ever read was one that I found back in High School. I forget the name of it now and I would guess that it isn’t even still up there on the interwebs anymore. However, the writer’s acerbic descriptions of his own life under the lights of an ambulance were hilarious and fascinating to me. I’ve never forgotten the words he wrote.

I was reminded again of one of his stories this morning when I was getting off shift. I’m finally back in the back of an ambulance after spending some time at my secret-squirrel job and I’m loving it. While I wish I got paid more to do what I love, I do truly love what I do. This morning was no different. Again, the EMS gods had me laughing until I cried while an elderly lady screamed in sheer terror.

Yes, I said that. No, I’m not a monster. You would probably have laughed too. Hard.

This morning the radio decided to wake me up around 0430 for the tip-up of the uninjured fall victim. I went, assessed, found nothing, and tipped the poor guy up back into bed. It was a simple call. He signed off on a refusal form, and all was right with the world again. I went back to the station to write the report and after some time spent in between dozing and typing on the Toughbook, I finished my report around 0600. By then it was too late to go back to bed and sleep for an hour, so I stayed up to wash the ambulance and make sure the shift chores were done. It’s the custom at our company to leave the quarters pristine for the oncoming shift, so we do a full cleaning in the morning before shift change. It works for us.

Around 0630, my partner and protégé Chadwick sauntered in to the station. The poor kid had been ran hard and put away wet the day before and looked unapologetically fresh in contrast to as haggard as I looked. Darn Kids. As he helped me dry the trucks and sweep the floor, I was teasing him about catching a late call.

“Can you feel it, Chad?” I would ask. “Right now, there’s some guy that’s waking up and walking up to the toilet for his morning dump who’s gonna vasovagal out and seize on the bathroom floor. It’s your call so when you kneel down, try to avoid the skid marks.”

I kept razzing him as time went on, and when we finished washing the trucks we walked outside to enjoy the crisp, bratwurst-and-cheese-scented Wisconsin morning.

“Did you hear that?” I asked, “that was someone hitting the floor”.

And amazingly, right then the tones went off. It was for a medical alarm that had been activated at a non-medical senior-living high-rise in town. Coincidentally, it was for a fall victim in the bathroom.

Nice.

Chadwick mumbled something that might have been profane I’d think if he wasn’t such a Bible-Thumper and hopped in the truck. I drove because it was his call. On went the lights before I opened the bay door. I think it’s more dramatic if I turn the lights on before I open the door. It just looks cooler that way. Johnny and Roy did it, so I can too. I also wear my helmet like they did. Yay me.

We arrived on scene right before the less-than-optimally-caffeinated police officer who was responding with us. He was able to finagle the key out of the knox box and let us into the building. Apparently last week one of our crew had gotten fed up with the key not being in the box at this building and had opened the lock in a gentle, professional way using his foot. Apparently the building management wasn’t happy with them for doing that, especially since it was for a call that turned out to be a false-trip of a medical alarm. Today we found the key in the box… weird how that happens.

Chadwick and I deftly navigated the long hallway and the small elevator up to the third floor with our stretcher and all equipment in tow. Hypo-caffeine Copper tagged along, and we found the door to the apartment locked up tight. Luckily for the maintenance man, he had the key right handy for us to use.

We entered the apartment with us yelling “Ambulance!” and him yelling “Police Department!”  I thought it was redundant, but hey… he needed to wake up and yelling something helps that. We heard the sound of a running shower and walked towards the bathroom yelling our respective titles.

The patient heard us, no doubt, and did her best Wicked Witch of the West impression as she yelled “Ohhh Myyyy GAAaaawwwd!” We explained again about the whole “Ambulance!” and “Police Department!” thing, but she was having none of it. We told her that somehow her button had gotten pressed and that the machine had called us, but that didn’t seem to ease her fright at having three strapping young men in uniform show up to help her shower, apparently.

After much consternation on her part, and my starting to laugh the tears out of my eyeballs we thanked the lady, apologized for her fright, and cleared the scene to head to the police department for the fresh pot of coffee the officer said he was dreaming about. We hung out, and since I’m a renaissance Medic I tweeted in a HIPAA friendly manner about the call.

Some of the responses included such things as:

 “So I guess the Medical Alarm button is now the ‘Bring Someone to Wash My Back Button??”

And,

“If she pressed the button and got three young public safety types to show up and help her in the shower, is there a way that I, personally could get the button for my own use? We’d have to have a gender setting, of course… As I require attractive young members of the other gender to help me with my showering endeavors”

And,

(something that was absolutely HILARIOUS regarding “Old Lady Boob” that I have redacted from my blog site, you’ll just have to get on to Twitter to see humor of that caliber)

So after this morning’s antics and activities, I can safely say that I absolutely love my job again. I never stopped, but I’m happy that I came back refreshed from my hiatus. I missed the people we see, their twisted humor, and their acerbic personalities. It’s just like the first EMS blog I read said it would be and I praise whomever he was for his accurate description.

Sorry about the lapse in posting, y’all. I’m back and am loving it. Hope you are all too.

Posted by on October 21, 2010 • Filed under: ambulance humor, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS Humor, EMS Motivation, EMS Topics, EMS training, Fire Rescue Topics, humor, In the Line of Duty, Paramedic, stories

Colorado CRNAs Vs. Virginia Physicians? An interesting feud for EMS

24 comments

This article came across my Twitter stream this morning. It regards a letter sent to the Centers for Medicare/Medicaid Services by the Governor of Colorado informing them that in some Colorado hospitals it is now acceptable for Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists to work independently of physician supervision.

The article, which is in the form of a letter written to the editor of The Aspen Times, is written by a Dr. Paul Rein who is the President of the Virginia Anesthesia and Peroperative Care Specialists. He takes issue with the lack of physician oversight and is “quite concerned” about it.

I think that the letter is important for EMS people to read. Especially us EMS people that are looking at how to expand our profession, grow our scope of practice, and expand our skill sets. It shows that there are struggles over these kinds of boundary and oversight issues all over the healthcare arena and that the politics and power struggles aren’t just limited to those of us that ride ‘round in ambulances.

The full text of the letter can be found here at The Aspen Times: http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20101004/LETTER/101009942/1020&ParentProfile=1061

The parallels I can draw from this issue to EMS are striking and enlightening. Here are some of the parts of the letter that I found the most interesting:

“A nurse anesthetist is an advanced practice registered nurse who has received special training to administer anesthesia, usually being supervised by an anesthesiologist. Anesthesiologists are physicians who, after medical school, receive an additional four to five years of specialized training during residency. Not only do anesthesiologists function in the operating room but they are trained to medically evaluate patients prior to surgery and to take care of problems that may arise immediately after surgery. In a few small hospitals a nurse anesthetist may be supervised by the surgeon if there is no anesthesiologist.”

I was curious as to the educational standards of a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist and so I went to their National Association’s web site: Http://www.AANA.com – It says this:

“The requirements for becoming a Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) mainly include having a bachelor’s degree in nursing, or other appropriate baccalaureate degree, Registered Nurse licensure, a minimum of 1 year acute care experience (ICU, ER for example), and the successful completion of both an accredited nurse anesthesia educational program and the certification examination.”

(Source: http://www.aana.com/BecomingCRNA.aspx?id=98&linkidentifier=id&itemid=98)

Huh.

Actually, I wasn’t familiar with the requirements for a CRNA before I read that, but it says that they have to have:

  • A four year degree in Something
  • Licensure as a Registered Nurse
  • A minimum of One Year Acute care experience
  • Completed an Accredited training program
  • A passing grade on the certification exam

I was curious, so I popped on over to Salary.com and typed in “Registered Nurse Anesthetist” in my own zip code for a base salary search. I found that they start out at $131,000 and top out at over $170,000 in my local area.

Then, after giving serious consideration to changing this blog from “Life Under the Lights” of Fire Trucks and Ambulances to “Life Under the Lights” of an Operating Room, I decided to point something else out about the differences and similarities of a Paramedic and a CRNA.

 “The didactic curricula of nurse anesthesia programs are governed by COA standards and provide students the scientific, clinical, and professional foundation upon which to build sound and safe clinical practice. The basic nurse anesthesia academic curriculum and prerequisite courses focus on coursework in anesthesia practice: pharmacology of anesthetic agents and adjuvant drugs including concepts in chemistry and biochemistry (105 contact hours); anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology (135 contact hours); professional aspects of nurse anesthesia practice (45 contact hours); basic and advanced principles (sic) of anesthesia practice including physics, equipment, technology (sic)  and pain management (105 contact hours); research (30 contact hours); and clinical correlation conferences (45 contact hours).

Most programs exceed these minimum requirements. In addition, many require study in methods of scientific inquiry and statistics, as well as active participation in student-generated and faculty-sponsored research.

Clinical residencies afford supervised experiences for students during which time they are able to learn anesthesia techniques, test theory, and apply knowledge to clinical problems. Students gain experience with patients of all ages who require medical, surgical, obstetrical, dental, and pediatric interventions. The results of a 1998 survey of program directors show that nurse anesthesia programs provide an average of 1,595 hours of clinical experience for each student.”

(Again, from http://www.AANA.com – the emphasis is mine)

Remember that the CRNA’s have a Bachelor’s Degree and a RN license prior to beginning their training. This is different from the Paramedic curriculum. We have hour requirements as well:

“The emphasis of paramedic education should be competence of the graduate, not the amount of education that they receive. The time involved in educating a paramedic to an acceptable level of competence depends on many variables. Based on the experience in the pilot and field testing of this curriculum, it is expected that the average program, with average students, will achieve average results in approximately 1000-1200 hours of instruction. The length of this course will vary according to a number of factors, including, but not limited to:

-student’s basic academic skills competence

-faculty to student ratio

-student motivation

-the student’s prior emergency/health care experience

-prior academic achievements

-clinical and academic resources available

-quality of the overall educational program”

 (Source: Http://www.EMS.gov – Thanks to Chris Webster, Sam Bradley, Greg Friese and Kevin Reiter)

Not that the above is related to the article I read, I mean it’s saying that people with a BS degree in something, a medical license, and what amounts to a little more than an EMT-B class plus an EMT-P class from an accredited school make an average of $150k… but I digress.

Back to the article, Dr Rein has this to say about CRNAs:

“It is interesting to note that the United States is the only westernized country in the world that allows nurses to administer anesthesia unsupervised. Countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Israel, just to name a few, have no nurses administering anesthesia. In some European countries there are a few nurse anesthetists who work under the strict supervision of a physician.”

He continues and says this:

“So what’s up with us? Well, it seems that the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists have convinced our government in Washington that unsupervised nurses are just as safe as a physician. They point to the fact that there are no comparative studies to show they are not. The reason there are no studies is that it would be unethical to perform such a study in which some people get a physician and some do not. Can you imagine a patient agreeing to participate in such a study?”

Can you imagine indeed?

Dr Rein is right when he says in the letter that Anesthesia is a Medical profession and is a specialty of physicians for a reason. When he says “Just because we have made it safe is no reason to take it for granted”, he’s right as well. Anesthesia is dangerous for the untrained and inexperienced provider and it is a specialty not to be taken lightly. However, where’s the line? Is this an attempt by the”Virginia Anesthesia and Peroperative Care Specialists” to fire a shot at the “American Association of Nurse Anesthetists?” Are Doctor Anesthesiologists afraid of losing jobs to the nurses? Where is the line where patient safety is best maintained while being most cost-effective and efficient?

If this doesn’t provide incentive to you to think about requiring a degree for Paramedics, I don’t quite know what will. I’m not doing this job for the money and neither are you, but does that make us any more or less moral than a CRNA who “Isn’t doing his/her job for the money” either, but still makes a ton more of it than any paramedic I know?

You could change the names of the players in this argument, fiddle just a bit with some of the details, and change this into one of a thousand other feuds going on under the healthcare umbrella. This is the same story that paramedics face when we’re trying to get new skills, new techniques, more money, and more responsibility. While I’m not taking a stand on the CRNA/MD issue because it’s not my specialty, I’m offering up this debate as a study in professional growth and conflict between two of the myriad of medical camps out there. As we push EMS forward, grow as a profession, and promote the EMS 2.0 agenda, learning from things like this will be of value to us all.

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Thanks to the following for their contributions:

Posted by on October 4, 2010 • Filed under: ckemtp rants, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, ems 2.0, ems education, EMS pay sucks, EMS pep talk, EMS Topics, EMS training, medical ethics, News, Paramedic, paramedic education, Patient Management, physician, politics, potential, profession, Training & Development, Uncategorized

I don’t usually talk about Political things…

4 comments

But when I do, they’re usually of the macro-local type and  have something directly to do with EMS.

This is one of those things.

The village of Schaumburg bucked the national trend of raising taxes and fees to cover rising expenses when its board unanimously approved a 4.4 percent reduction to the 2010 property tax levy

You read that right: reduction.

But that’s not all.  Village officials also did away with vehicle sticker fees and moved to have property taxes cover garbage removal.  

Just for the record, Schaumburg is in Illinois, folks. The same state that sent our senator up to the White House last election cycle. Lowering taxes isn’t exactly the modus operandi for an Illinois municipality. In fact:

Schaumburg is an anomaly among Illinois municipalities. Others like Gurnee and Orland Park raising taxes and fees where ever they can. Northbrook, which has seen an increase in sales tax revenue stood pat.

Schaumburg is one of the larger municipalities in the sprawling conglomeration of suburbs surrounding Chicago. It faces the exact same economic challenges that other municipalities in the area face, but it seems to be doing much better, economy wise.

The measure, if you read the article, isn’t final, but it looks like it will pass. Schaumburg has a full-time Fire/EMS dept and pays their firefighters extremely well, they also seem to have great city services and every time I’ve been in the city I’ve liked what I’ve seen.

In fact, the recent NAEMSE conference was held in a hotel in Schaumburg, and they played a small part in paying the hotel tax.

As I’ve said before, I’m not one to wax too poltical on this blog. This is an EMS and Fire blog and you come here to read about things related to Fire and EMS. I understand that. I don’t want to hijack the discussion to the miasma that is our national political scene and end up alienating a different percentage of my readership every time I post something of an opinionated political nature. However, local politics affect EMS and Fire, and I speak on the politics of EMS quite a bit. This is one of those issues.

I have to ask the question here:

Businesses pay taxes, residents pay taxes, Visitors pay taxes… It goes to say that the more businesses, residents, and visitors a locality gets, the more taxes they’ll pay by sheer volume. People have a choice on where they locate their business, where they visit, and where they choose to live. If you were in the position to do any of these things, knowing that Schaumburg is lowering their taxes, and plans on removing their property tax entirely - just like they said they would – would you choose to do so in Schaumburg, or in the other towns mentioned in this article?

In additon, removing the stupid municipal car stickers, which are really just a massive inconvenience and hassle to the residents of a city, and covering garbage disposal fees through what’s left of the property tax?

Well, Schaumburg… you may just be an island of sanity in an insane state. May word get out and people flock to your borders. It’s called “competition” and usually only successful businesses are the groups that think of lowering their prices to become more attractive to the customer. Bravo.

Source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local-beat/Schaumburg-Officials-May-Lower-Property-Taxes-103947993.html?dr#ixzz10vUpO9PP

Posted by on September 29, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, Economics, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS Management, EMS Topics, fire, Fire Rescue Topics, Funding & Staffing, News, newspaper, Paramedic, Uncategorized

EMS case law? AMA Refusals, Death, and Documentation

18 comments

Our friend Valerie DeFrance, who runs the EMS House of Defrance from way up in the Vast Frozen Wasteland facebooked this article this morning and you need to read it.

http://www.leagle.com/unsecure/page.htm?shortname=inmoco20100921246

Yep, check that URL. It’s from a site that specializes in putting out snippets of case law and this one’s simply all-too-common.

You should read the article, or at least skim through the salient points, because this affects you personally. You as an EMS provider should know about this. Pay attention to this case and what it means to you.

In this case, a Paramedic/EMT-B ambulance responded to a person experiencing Chest Pain and Difficulty Breathing. This is a quote from the article: (The emphasis is mine)

The unit arrived at decedent’s home and Respondents performed a primary survey of the decedent ten minutes after the initial call was placed. Respondents followed up on their primary survey with a secondary survey a minute later. They then obtained a set of vital signs. Based on their examination, Respondents diagnosed decedent with acid reflux and recommended a treatment of over-the-counter Maalox/Gaviscon. Believing decedent was in no immediate medical danger, Respondents left the home fifteen minutes after arriving.

The next morning at approximately 10:30 a.m. decedent again called 9-1-1, still complaining of difficulty breathing and chest pains. An ambulance unit from Community Fire Protection District was again dispatched to decedent’s home arriving five minutes later. This unit was manned by a different two-person team than had responded the night before. After finding the decedent was experiencing pain across the chest and into the back, shortness of breath, diaphoresis and nausea, the team began administering emergency treatment with oxygen, aspirin and EKG. At 10:55 a.m. the team initiated emergency transport of decedent to DePaul Health Center where he was admitted ten minutes later. At the Health Center decedent was diagnosed with cardiac arrest and pulmonary embolism and began receiving treatment. The treatment was unsuccessful and decedent died at 4:00 p.m. on 11 July 2008.

So do you see a problem there?

First off, I’m assuming they obtained an AMA refusal form (and if they didn’t, they’re idiots). This case highlights exactly what I’ve always said about refusals being worthless. There’s no mention of the patient having refused transport here. In fact, this isn’t a case on whether or not the EMTs actions were correct or incorrect. This is simply a case to see whether or not they have protection under the doctrine of Sovereign Immunity. It looks to me like they were basing their defense on whether or not they have that legal protection, not basing it on their thought that they provided proper care. It looks like they were assumed not to have provided it. In this case, a signed refusal meant nothing. If they were successfully sued with no mention of the AMA form, what good is it?

Second off, it’s in the official record that their PRIMARY survey took less than a minute… and I can believe that if they were solely attempting to rule out an immediate life threat. That’s what the primary survey is for. As evidenced by the fact that the deceased lasted another ten hours, I can assume that there was no immediate threat to his life. However, they then did a “secondary survey” one minute later and cleared the scene with what I assume to be an AMA refusal in just fifteen minutes. So if we time this out, they made it to the patient’s side in one minute, did two assessments, obtained a refusal, and cleared the scene in 15 minutes? That’s one minute to grab gear and walk to the patient, a minute to rule out immediate life threats, a few minutes to do a secondary assessment and vitals, with no mention of an EKG, and a few minutes to carry whatever gear they took in back to the truck, get back in the truck, and clear? Um… Either these are the fastest medics in the West, or they did a very poor assessment.

And the guy died. And they got sued. And they lost. And they freaking deserved to lose.

The second crew seems to have provided proper care for the patient, and that is evidenced in the case outcome. In fact, the lawyers and the judge seem to have made it a point to show the poor care provided by the first crew in contrast to the proper care provided by the second crew. It’s clearly evident here and I’ll bet that if we were to go to that agency and inspect it, we could probably see the difference in dedication and motivation between the first and second crew. The first paramedic comes off as lazy, callous, and stupid whereas the second paramedic comes off as competent and caring. I’d be willing to bet that this is honestly the case. That the first medic was a “good enough” medic who often encouraged AMA refusals and performed just to the bare minimum and the second medic was somewhat better than the first.

So how, as EMS providers, how do we protect against the precedent set by this case law?

The answer is still now as it always has been, do a thorough assessment every time, kick the decisions up to the physician, and document, document, document. This case was in 2008 and if you were doing EMS back then, you know that a 12-lead EKG was the standard of care. This patient should have had a working diagnosis (Chest pain), attempts at making a differential diagnosis (lung sounds, History and Physical Exam, EKG, SpO2, and trended vital signs and 12-leads) and should have been transported. If the patient wanted to refuse, the physician medical control should have been contacted and this should have been documented. The time limit of 14 minutes of assessment and/or care in this case is evidence that this didn’t happen. The medics blew his call for help off and the patient died.

Here’s what I would have done: I would have performed a thorough patient assessment including lung sounds, ABD assessment, and a history. I would have gotten the OPQRST of the patient’s complaint, and performed serial 12-lead EKGs. Then I would have transported. If the patient refused, I would have transmitted the 12-lead EKG, spoken with a physician about the case, and attempted to have the physician speak with the patient. This all would have been thoroughly documented.

Patients have the right to refuse care if they are conscious, alert, and oriented. They have this right even if they’re being stupid. We have the responsibility to help them make a proper, rational decision and to show that we made every effort to provide them with the best possible information. Proper patient care and excellent documentation are the way we protect against these types of lawsuits… and that really hasn’t changed.

This kind of situation can and does happen. Protect yourself and your agency by never becoming lazy. Document! Document! Document! Do your best every time. Be thorough and don’t succumb to mediocrity just because it’s easy. It will catch up to you just like it did to these two.

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For more tips on EMS documentation:

Posted by on September 27, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, Case law, Command & Leadership, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS ethics, EMS Management, ems narrative, EMS narrative report, ems patient care report, ems report, EMS Topics, EMS training, Management, narrative, narrative report, Paramedic, paramedic education, Patient Management, scenario, scenario based training, Training & Development

A Weighted Issue? A Burning Issue… Wow.

5 comments

I’ve always said that I love EMS and that I’ve taken from it far more than I could ever give back to it. The same is true with this blog. From my readers and people who comment, I learn more than I can teach and enjoy more than I can entertain.

This weekend proved all of those facts quite well.

If you didn’t read the blog over the weekend, you missed an amazing discussion on my last post. The post, “A Weighted Issue, The Fire Service Helping Private EMS” discussed the case of a private ambulance requesting a fire department for assistance in carrying a bariatric patient back into her home on a long-distance hospital discharge. The private ambulance was 5 or 6 hours out of their area of operations and the Fire Department was a full-time municipal department.

I linked to the stories that had popped up on www.JEMS.com and also on www.EMS1.com. I wrote my feelings on the issue, explored the case a bit, and then opened up the floor to the readers for their comments.

And what happened floored me, just knocked me over.

Predictably, I started getting comments on the post… Then some more… then more.. then a LOT more.. then a TON more. The post spread like wildfire and attracted some of the most intelligent discussion I’ve ever had here. It’s by far my most commented post with 86 at the time I write this.

And I read them all. I love comments, they come to my BlackBerry. Really. I read the discussion, the back and forth, and the wide spectrum of opinions as they came in, sometimes two and three at a time.

And my opinion has been swayed… my original perception that the Fire Department was Evil has been tempered. My original perception that the Private Ambulance could have dropped a dime and handled the issue with a phone call before the incident has not changed. However, I now focus my ire on the system that caused this issue.

The reimbursement structure holds the ambulance service hostage. No private ambulance would be reimbursed for hauling the patient with extra people. The service wouldn’t have been reimbursed for a 2nd rig and the patient had to be taken home. My guess, as was stated by a handful of commenters, is that the service was taking the patient as a favor to garner more business from the rehab hospital. I have no way of knowing that for sure, but it makes sense to me.

Not only did I get a TON, just a ton of great discussion… but the post spawned a few others as well.

This event has taught me something that should be the takeaway for us all. That is this: Issues like this are not going away. In fact, they’re only going to get more common. Private EMS isn’t evil and the “Private Transport Industry” is necessary for the functioning of our healthcare system. Fire-Based EMS will have to help and could never handle the strain of not having private EMS.

Sorry to both parties here, we’re all needed in the current system. Healthcare needs us all.

So play nice and help each other out. Remember the Golden Rule.

And remember the five P’s: “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance”

I shall leave you with two things:

http://lifeunderthelights.com/2010/09/a-weighted-issue-the-fire-service-helping-private-ems/ – A link to the post for you to wade into the comments if you haven’t (you should. Bring a snack)

And this, a  video that this experience has brought to my mind. “The Hats of Incident Management” It’s about highway incidents… but you’ll get the point. It’s a classic.

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Posted by on September 21, 2010 • Filed under: 911 fail, Administration & Leadership, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS Topics, Fire department, Fire Rescue Topics, Paramedic, professionalism, Uncategorized

A Weighted Issue – The Fire Service Helping Private EMS

111 comments

There has been quite a bit of buzz lately over a story that happened pretty close to my generic neck of the woods. It’s been featured on www.JEMS.com as well as www.EMS1.com and has blown up the twitter streams. I was made aware of it by the JEMS Facebook fan page posting the link two days ago.

Before I link to the article, I’d like to say that I was immediately on the side of the private ambulance company and I jumped right on the JEMS facebook comments thread to state my case. I figured that there would be some dissention, but that most people would share my view.

But that’s not exactly what happened…

Apparently there is a vast chasm in opinions out there on this issue, and it’s not just the Firefighters vs. the non-firefighters like I thought it would be. The comments section is up to 61 comments as I write this and the discussion is poignant and well reasoned. I still believe in what I said… but I’m willing to revisit the issue

Here’s the article: http://www.jems.com/article/news/illinois-fire-department-refus

So… do you see the discord there?

The private ambulance service, which is a pretty new company that runs only one or two ambulances was started by a paramedic with a dream (yea, really). It took the patient from a rehab hospital to a private residence in Springfield, IL. I don’t know the exact road mileage, but I do know that Springfield, IL is a good 4 to 5 hours away from where the rehabilitation hospital is located. The patient was reported to have been on Medicare and Medicaid and weighed approximately 700lbs.

Yep, this ambulance crew had to take a 700 pound patient on a long distance transfer. I feel their pain.

The crew couldn’t get the patient from their ambulance into the residence when they got there and called the Springfield FD (SFD) for assistance moving the patient. SFD refused to assist them.

Ultimately, the private ambulance crew arranged for another private ambulance from a Springfield area company to come and help them. The job got done and everyone was happy, right?

Well, no… of course that’s not what happened. Someone alerted the media and the story popped up on the wire. Now there’s debate flying all over the interwebs and I for one want to keep it going. Viva debate. Viva discussion.

Here’s my comment from the JEMS Facebook Page:alled “community service” which I guess is something they don’t understand in Springfield.

There is nothing wrong with private ambulances and even the staunchest fire service EMS person would agree that no fire department would accept a long distance transfer (in this case, probably a good 5hrs) discharging a Pt from a rehab hospital to home. Some service has to exist to do this type of work, and Mercy Ambulance stepped up to do it. The patient was a TAXPAYING CITIZEN of Springfield FD’s area and Mercy was returning that taxpaying citizen to his or her home. This person has already paid for Springfield FD’s services and they refused to provide them.

I would guess that SFD regularly responds to other so-called “Nusaince calls” all the time, or have they stopped responding to Activated Fire Alarms, dumpster fires, and CO alarms as well?

Mercy Ambulance wasn’t doing this for the money. The reimbursement from Medicare is laughable and the “reimbursement” from IL medicaid is pretty much non-existant. They did this because the patient needed to get home. The reimbursement system is such that they would have had to eat the cost of additional crew and making the assumption that the SFD would respond for the “Public Assist” of one of it’s tax-paying constituents is reasonable.

SFD gets a letter in the file for this one.

I’m actually familiar with the ambulance service in question. In the area that it mainly operates within, the Fire service is always happy to help out the private ambulances with these types of cases. It has to do with providing something called “community service” which I guess is something they don’t understand in Springfield.

There is nothing wrong with private ambulances and even the staunchest fire service EMS person would agree that no fire department would accept a long distance transfer (in this case, probably a good 5hrs) discharging a Pt from a rehab hospital to home. Some service has to exist to do this type of work, and Mercy Ambulance stepped up to do it. The patient was a TAXPAYING CITIZEN of Springfield FD’s area and Mercy was returning that taxpaying citizen to his or her home. This person has already paid for Springfield FD’s services and they refused to provide them.

I would guess that SFD regularly responds to other so-called “Nusaince calls” all the time, or have they stopped responding to Activated Fire Alarms, dumpster fires, and CO alarms as well?

Mercy Ambulance wasn’t doing this for the money. The reimbursement from Medicare is laughable and the “reimbursement” from IL medicaid is pretty much non-existant. They did this because the patient needed to get home. The reimbursement system is such that they would have had to eat the cost of additional crew and making the assumption that the SFD would respond for the “Public Assist” of one of its tax-paying constituents is reasonable.

SFD gets a letter in the file for this one

That has been “liked” six times since I wrote it.

The rub here for the Defenders of the Fire Service™ is that they say that the “Medical Transportation Industry” is an “Industry” and therefore should have their own plans in place to deal with this type of case. They say that they shouldn’t diminish their ability to respond to emergency requests in order to help out a private business with a client. They say that they would expose themselves to liability, expose themselves to potential injuries of their employees, and that they would be providing this service for free. They say that this isn’t their job and that they shouldn’t be spending taxpayer dollars to help out a private entity.

And… I might concede that to them if I thought it was genuine. I mean, does the fire service help out the towing and recovery industry with cleaning up car wrecks? Do they help out the private fire alarm business by responding to and resetting false alarms? Do they provide private residences with smoke and carbon monoxide alarms?

Yes, of course they do all that. They do other things too. They help out all kinds of community entities, both public and private, for-profit and not-for-profit all the time. The Defenders of the Fire Service™ keep trumpeting their statement that they are an “All-Hazards” emergency response agency that is constantly adapting to meet “the needs that the public are demanding from them”.

All of those community entities the fire service assists have one thing in common, they pay taxes. Some of them pay property taxes, some of them pay rent that goes in-part to pay property taxes, and some of the straight not-for-profits provide services that help the people paying property taxes.

And last time I checked, the SFD does receive property taxes.

Here’s one thing with what I said though… The “All-Hazards response” idea is for responding to “hazards” and I can see where a private ambulance needing a hand isn’t exactly a hazard or an emergent need.

Would any of the Fire Departments I’ve worked on have done it? Yes, absolutely. A citizen needed an assist and we would have marked it as a “Public Assist”. We would have responded non-emergent, helped, and it would have been a non-issue. The person pays tax dollars and we would have looked at it as the same as responding with an engine for a 911 lift assist.

However, I will concede that the Private ambulance service would have been more proactive if they would have called the SFD and asked them if they would help them before they loaded the patient. If the SFD told them “no” at that time, they could have arranged for alternate methods at that time. Instead, they just assumed. They transported the patient to someone else’s sandbox and just hoped that they would play nicely.

And the SFD doesn’t play the way that Mercy Ambulance is used to playing.

If you can’t tell, I’m on the side of Mercy Ambulance here. Although I say that they should have dropped the dime and rang the SFD to ask them before they just assumed they’d help.

One thing’s for sure though, this issue isn’t going away and it will probably become more common. There’s a ton of differing opinions out there as shown by the comments that news story received and it shows that there are EMS professionals on both sides of the fence that have strong and reasoned opinions. This is an issue that would benefit from some discourse and that’s why I’m bringing it up.

What are your thoughts?

Posted by on September 17, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, ckemtp, ckemtp rants, edemse, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS ethics, EMS Health & Safety, EMS Topics, Fire department, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Safety & Health, News, Paramedic, Patient Management, politics

What Difference Does EMS Make? Choose Your Own Ending

17 comments

John didn’t need his alarm clock this morning. In fact, he was wide awake just a few minutes before it went off. He turned it off so as to not wake up his wife and got up quietly to start the day. Today was going to be great. It was huge. Months of work at the office were finally going to be recognized today in the biggest project meeting he’d had in a year. Today’s meeting would launch his career faster than almost anything he’d done before. He was excited. He was ready.

John showered, shaved, and got dressed up in his new suit that he’d bought the day before. He wanted to look his best for this meeting. Everything was counting on it. His wife Joanne had coffee and a quick breakfast ready for him when he came down the stairs. He sipped on his coffee for a bit as he ate his breakfast. It was really sweet of her to do that, He thought and he told her so with an extra hug and kiss as he left for his commute. He wanted to be to work early today to make sure that he was there to answer any pre-meeting questions. This was the day.

Traffic was light on the interstate that morning and John was moving at a good clip. It was strange, he thought, for traffic to be this kind to him on a Monday morning but he figured it was a good omen. His phone buzzed with an e-mail and he glanced at it. It wasn’t anything that couldn’t wait until he was in the office, he thought. Then a great song came on the radio. John reached down to turn up the volume so he could get pumped up for the drive…

He never saw the cars stopped just in front of him.

Mary took care of herself pretty well for a type one diabetic. Her doctor had told her that. She stuck to her diet, maintained her sugar levels meticulously, and took her insulin on a sliding scale that seemed to be working perfectly. Her blood sugar readings were always right where her doctor said they should be. Mary was proud of that. She worked out and tried to get out walking or jogging the trail at the park at least 3 or 4 times a week. She felt good, looked good, and thought that she was doing all she could to take charge of her health.

It was a beautiful Saturday morning and Mary thought that she should take her dog Patches out for a walk around the pond. Patches was a 1 year old Golden Retriever and loved jumping in the lake to fetch sticks. Mary had taken her morning dose of insulin, popped a multivitamin tablet from her new bottle that she’d bought the day before, and ate a quick bit of breakfast before she put Patches on his leash and started walking to the park. It was about five blocks away and patches knew the route well. Everything was great, until the nausea hit… Mary tried to fight it but knew that she was going to throw up when she started salivating and breathing heavily. She ended up throwing up in some bushes next to the sidewalk. She thought that she was lucky. Nobody saw her hurl up her breakfast and she immediately felt better. It must have just been the new vitamins that made her stomach upset, she thought as she continued walking to the park. She figured that she just wouldn’t take them again.

Mary never felt sick. She just thought that she should take a nap. The rock over there looked like a good place. Why was she so sleepy? Never mind… Just lay down and nap. Nap good.

Luckily, another jogger happened by to find Mary unresponsive.

Work had been scarce lately and Steve was happy to get his truck back on the road. He drove a live-bottom trailer hauling asphalt for a big local paving company and they hadn’t had many big projects come their way lately. Driveway work was steady, but rarely did the company need Steve to drive a big truck out to a site for a driveway job. Steve made his best money and hours when the company had highway work and today was the first day of a big job they’d just gotten. He’d been in line with the other trucks waiting his turn to dump his load into the paver for hours and even though he was happy to be working, he had to pee. Minutes turned into hours and finally it was his turn to drop his blacktop and head back for a new load. He couldn’t wait to be done. He really had to pee by this time and he knew exactly where his next opportunity would be. He backed his trailer up to the paver and raised the bed. Then through his rear-view mirror he saw the people scramble and jump off of the paver. He felt his truck lurch forward as the paver machine was pushed into it from the impact of a car travelling too fast in the construction zone. When he jumped out of his truck after looking to make sure there was nobody coming at him, he saw his friend Luke laying on the ground. Luke was bleeding, bad. The car and the paver were a tangled mess of metal and there was someone screaming at an unmoving figure in the passenger seat of the car.

Steve no longer had to pee…

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Note to blog readers:     I can’t quite decide on what I should do from this point on. I can take two paths, one is a rallying call to community members asking them to put themselves in the place of the people in the above cases and get out there and support their local EMS. The other, is a rallying call to us EMS people… I’ve written it both ways. You can see what you like best.

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Option #1

Every day, Paramedics and EMTs put on their uniforms, fire up their ambulances, and get ready to face the onslaught of whatever mayhem the streets produce for them during their shift. They do a job that is unpredictable, complicated, and vital to the community. These three stories could happen to you or someone you love tomorrow and each of them will require the response of a highly trained, expert Emergency Medical Services (EMS) provider. There are times when your local ambulance service makes the difference between life and death but there are far more times when they make a big difference in a person’s continuing quality of life. By interceding in the first few moments of a medical emergency with highly trained experts, EMS makes a difference for us all. Communities that support their local Emergency Medical Services have better services and community members that are more educated about what makes quality EMS are better suited to support their local services.

You may not think about the people who respond to your call when you dial 911, but all we do is think about you. Get informed, get involved, and support your local Emergency Medical Services.

We’re there for you. We need you to return the favor.

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Option #2

As you come in to work today, lace up your boots, or turn on your pager, think about the patients in the above cases. They’re people just like anyone you see in your day to day life. They and others like them didn’t intend to be placed in the situations they’re facing and to them; theirs is one of the most intense situations of their life. Their very life and the continuing quality of their lives could rest in your hands today. They are depending on you. Their families are depending on you. Your knowledge, skill, and preparation to perform your best are paramount to these people. Their care rests on you. You owe them your best and there is no excuse they’ll accept for poor performance.

EMS providers transcend their self when they lace up their boots and sign on for duty. Society needs us. Our patients need us. We need us. We will never know the impact we’ll have on the lives of our patients, their families, and their communities… but it’s huge. We as EMS providers play a pivotal role in our communities. They’ll never acknowledge it en masse… but that doesn’t diminish its importance. Recognition for our skills isn’t necessary for our skills to be vital. EMS people do their jobs because they’re important. We do our jobs because our guts tell us that what we’re doing is right… and even when we stumble and find ways to improve ourselves and our care, it doesn’t diminish the importance of what we’ve done. We have acted, and we continue to act in the best interest of humanity.

Today you can make a choice. You can make the choice to seek out and become the best EMS provider you can be or you can choose not to. I suggest that you make the right choice but no one will ever be able to force you. Your care is an art and a science. Your performance is based upon hard science and soft intuition. There can never be a book that will tell you exactly what is right for every situation… you simply have to learn it and learn how to make the right decisions to fit the situations you find yourself in.

My advice to all EMS providers is to take the high road. Err on the side of what you truly feel is best for your patient. Do your best. Study hard and learn from those you consider the best among us. As an EMS provider, you bear the burden of an overloaded system that pays poorly and garners little respect. I feel it too. I say that it doesn’t diminish the importance of what we do and it isn’t the individual patient’s fault. They deserve our best no matter what the system is doing to us. It’s our responsibility and our calling. It has been said that the definition of a “Professional” is one who can perform their duty adequately in conditions that would cause the amateur to turn back. I’d say that we’re living in those conditions today, but we still have to perform. Do your best and know your stuff. Lives depend on your commitment.

It is our job to promote ourselves. It is our job to elevate EMS. It is our job to speak out and optimize the system. The fault for its failings lies within our profession and it is our job to change it. All of us, individually and collectively have the responsibility.

Will you answer?

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So I got a little philosophical in this one. Which ending do you like better?

Posted by on September 7, 2010 • Filed under: 911, edemse, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, ems 2.0, ems education, EMS Motivation, EMS pep talk, ems scenario, ems scenario based education, EMS Topics, EMS training, Ethics, everyday ems ethics, Fire Rescue Topics, In the Line of Duty, inside the mind of a paramedic, letter to the editor, Line of Duty, Paramedic, paramedic education, Patient Management, pride, profession, professionalism, Public relations, scenario, scenario based training, stories, Training & Development, training-fire-rescue-topics

Shining through Suffering – Learning How to Cope with Sadness in EMS

7 comments

Medic Trommashear, who writes great stuff has offered to co-post with me on this. You can check it out at her blog: http://lookingthroughapairofpinkhandledtraumashears.com/

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This morning the wife came home from her night shift on the ambulance and told me a sad story. During the wee hours of the morning she handled a rather nasty fatality accident. The victim, a 20-something male was walking home from a party on a dark country road and tragically, a passing motorist didn’t see him in time and the accident ensured that he’d never make it. Pedestrian vs. car accidents at high speeds have a way of doing that.

Sad stories like this are getting more common for her as she’s immersed herself fully into paramedic school and professional EMS in general. She’s been seeing sad stuff multiple times per week it seems. I can see that it’s wearing on her and I feel her pain. I have experienced it quite a bit myself in my own career and I continue to do so on a regular basis. Jumping into full-time EMS exposes a person to sadness on a level that can’t easily be prepared for. A person just has to jump in with both feet and not be afraid to feel the range of emotions that they’re going to be exposed to. It’s hard, it’s tough, and it’s one of those things a person just has to learn how to overcome if they want to make EMS a part of their life.

That’s the part that most people don’t get, I think. The part where you have to “Learn How” to overcome the sadness and negative emotions we’re faced with as EMS people. A common statement that lay people make when they hear that I am a paramedic is “Oh, I could never do that job and see what you see. I just couldn’t handle it”. Perhaps they’re right, but I would guess that anyone can train themselves to handle almost anything. My pseudoscientific opinion is that we develop our tolerance and our healthy ways of dealing with being exposed to such negative emotions on a regular basis through experiencing it and learning ways to function and feel happy afterwards. It’s harder for some than others and I can’t imagine that there is a single roadmap for learning it. It’s individual. Friends help and so does an understanding family. Good coworkers are great to observe and learn from as long as they realize their own humanity and aren’t simply trying to fool themselves out of bravado. We’re all human and I can testify that we’re all affected, no matter how thick our skin may appear.

Back when I was a new medic I was working a ton of hours. I mean, I worked a lot. I worked TOO much. I worked for days on end without sleep for multiple jobs. At the time, I felt I had good reason. I was attempting college for the first time, taking care of my recently deceased father’s businesses, and trying to sock away money to help my mother. I worked a full-time EMS job, a full-time hospital job, ran the businesses, and volunteered for a separate fire department and EMS agency. It was nuts. I would literally go for days without sleep. During that time it seemed like I was getting slammed by horribly sad calls. I felt I was surrounded by suffering and death. I was working at least two codes a week on average. Mayhem and madness seemed to rule the day. I was getting deeper and deeper and…

I was going nuts.

I was horribly, deeply depressed.

I almost went insane.

I was at my darkest hour when I found myself angry at anything that was cute or fun. Literally things like jokes, teddy bears, and Hallmark cards made me angry. I just couldn’t see how people could stand to look at that kind of stuff when there was so much suffering in the world. How frivolous! What a waste of time! It made me angry to think of anything that didn’t acknowledge the pain I was bearing witness to on such a regular basis. I was depressed and angry. I just couldn’t understand anything other than feeling the pain that the people I was taking care of were feeling. It affected my life, my work, and my human interaction. It was horrible.

Then I had an epiphany that changed my personality and who I am to this day.

Those who meet me know that I like to joke around. A lot. There are things that I take seriously however I do not personally happen to be one of them. My epiphany was that the stuff that was cute, fun, loving, friendly, and/or happy was all that actually did matter in life. We combat the bad with the good, the yang with the yin. I chose to pay attention to the comedy of life and downplay the tragedy. After that revelation, my whole outlook on life and my personality changed for the better. I had found that comedy, friendship, and love were the ways to live my life. Come what may, I can make a joke about it and that makes it ok. I laugh at inappropriate times and seek out the good in life. My life and career ensure that I’ll still have an onslaught of human tragedy thrown at me whether I’m ready for it or not but If I can actively seek out the positive, I may just end up ahead of the game.

To my wife, I love you. Hopefully you don’t end up where I have been… but I’ll be here for you, come what may. I understand what you’re going through and I love you for this any many, many other reasons. Always.

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You may want to read one of my most popular posts. It’s an older post of mine where I explore what I call “Splashed Sadness”. It’s along these lines. We EMS people have to deal with a lot. Never be afraid to share it. Don’t hold it in. Get it out and learn how you can cope with it because there’s not a one of us ain’t human.

“Splashed Sadness – A look at Negative Emotions in EMS”

Or “Reflections on an Easter Morning” – another post about a bad call.

Also, don’t forget to check out Medic Trommashear’s co-post on this. You can check it out at her blog: http://lookingthroughapairofpinkhandledtraumashears.com/

(Note: I’ll link to the post directly when it’s up)

Posted by on August 30, 2010 • Filed under: bad calls, Emergency Medical Services, emotions, EMS, EMS Health & Safety, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Safety & Health, inside the mind of a paramedic, Line of Duty, Paramedic, psychology, sadness, Training & Development, Uncategorized

Too Much Information For a Paramedic?

19 comments

 

This is a coordinated post by our friends Greg Friese and Steve Whitehead.

 - Greg’s post on this topic can be found at: http://www.everydayemstips.com/?p=3628

 - Steve’s post on this topic can be found at: http://theemtspot.com/2010/08/25/too-much-information/

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“They Don’t Know What They Don’t Know”

It’s an established fact that 60% of fatalities within confined spaces are would-be rescuers. They see someone down in a confined space, enter the space, and are overcome by the conditions that took down the initial victim. The process sometimes repeats itself, with multiple would-be rescuers entering the space and falling victim themselves. It’s tragic really, but the cold, hard fact is that these people are victims of their own ignorance. They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know that there is a fatal set of conditions within the space, and they don’t know that whatever it is that killed the first victim, or subsequent victims, will kill them as well. It’s a well documented phenomenon that plays on the compassion of the would-be rescuers and ends up getting them killed.

They simply don’t know what they don’t know.

Hey Guys?? Guys?

So when I was approached by our friend Greg Friese from www.EveryDayEMStips.com the other day regarding a comment he received on one of his training articles, I was interested in doing a co-post with him. He also has contacted our friend Steve Whitehead from www.TheEMTspot.com and together we’re tri-posting on this issue. Their links will follow below and are just great as always.

The comment that followed this online training article was written presumably by a paramedic. It was a critique of the article that simply stated “too much information for a paramedic”. I read that, and immediately thought of confined space incidents, where ignorance can get a person killed. Lots of situations fit that scenario and it’s not always the rescuers who get killed. EMS providers who “don’t know what they don’t know” can and do kill patients. More often, they don’t provide the best possible care.

There’s this thing that we have made it our business to know how to repair. It’s called the “Human Body” and if you’re reading this article, the chances are good that you possess one. The human body is VASTLY complex. It’s the most complex machine we humans know about and we are still learning about it to this day. There are some amazingly smart people out there who have dedicated their lives to studying these meat machines that our brains pilot around and they still haven’t figured everything out yet. We can help set it back on course to heal itself in a lot of cases but we can’t construct a new one. We don’t know about all the minutia, the microscopic works inside of it that make it do all of the amazing things that it does. The levels of systems within systems that function seamlessly within still other systems are numerous and fascinating. I learn something new about it all the time, and still there are people who know vast amounts more about the inner workings of it and about the huge number of things that can affect it’s operating effectiveness than I do. The human body is remarkably complex yet elegant and perfect in its design.

C'mon... Don't be a wuss.

And we who call ourselves “medical professionals” are well advised to study every possible aspect of it. Consider it your “life’s work”. If your job is to fix and support the end users of the human body, you darn well better know everything you can about it.

“But”, you say, “There are people out there who are supposed to know much more about the human body than we are. They’re called Physicians, and they get paid a whole lot more than we do. We’re just paramedics. (or EMTs).” And you’d be right for saying that, of course. Physicians have the ultimate responsibility for knowing the human body. It’s their life’s work as well. Their patients live and die based upon their knowledge, skills, and talents they have for examining the human body and being able to figure out what’s going on. Their whole practice is based upon their knowledge, skill, and talent. The more they know when they’re working there, the better provider they are.

It’s that simple, and it’s exactly the same for us EMS people. The more we know, the better we are. Nobody is better served by dumbing us down. Nothing is gained by denying yourself knowledge. Not a single patient is better served by you not knowing everything you can know about what is going wrong with them and it’s your duty to learn as much as you can about what you’re supposed to know about.

What is the line for how much paramedics “need to know?” Is everything that we need to know covered by our initial training course? Is that everything we need to get out there in the world and start slinging IVs and Meds all willy nilly?

I look at the paramedic license as a “learner’s permit”. It’s the baseline knowledge level needed to function at that level under supervision. It’s a jumping off point from which the provider should immerse themselves in knowledge. I can certainly say that I’ve learned volumes past my initial certification and that the “extra” knowledge has saved lives. Did you know that Fentanyl can cause chest muscle tetany when administered too rapidly? Or how about that lasix, when pushed too rapidly can cause hearing loss?  Do you know that ST depression in the high V leads can signify a posterior MI? What about differentiating an acetabulum fracture from a “pulled groin”? Can you reliably predict the patients whose blood pressure is going to crash after Nitroglycerine administration by reading a 12-lead EKG? What about the clinical presentation of a non-ST elevation MI? Do you know the MEND stroke screen? What about the different neurological exams to find an intracranial bleed?

Etcetera, etcetera… The point is, there isn’t a cut off. The final exam we take for our licensures prepares us with the baseline knowledge to get out there and learn what it takes to make us truly great EMS providers. The true professional will learn this, and constantly seek the knowledge he or she needs. The average to sub-average provider will comment that they “don’t need to know” something.

Get out there, get fascinated, and learn as much as you can. It will never be enough knowledge… but your mind is a sponge for a reason.

Study Hard. Know Your Stuff. No Excuses.

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This is a coordinated post by our friends Greg Friese and Steve Whitehead. Be sure to read their posts on this

Greg’s post on this topic can be found at: http://www.everydayemstips.com/?p=3628

Steve’s post on this topic can be found at: http://theemtspot.com/2010/08/25/too-much-information/

Posted by on August 24, 2010 • Filed under: change, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, ems education, EMS ethics, EMS Motivation, EMS practice, EMS rant, EMS Topics, EMS training, Paramedic, paramedic education, Patient Management, Training & Development, training-fire-rescue-topics, Uncategorized

EMS: Is what you do the Best You Can Do?

11 comments

Not too long ago I was reading an article in Entrepreneur Magazine when I came across an article speaking on negotiating tactics. I wish I could find it, but unfortunately it was long enough ago that I’ve disposed of the printed issue (I subscribe) and cannot find it on the web. It was a good article and it taught me some words that I’ve since used quite a bit in my own life:

“Is that the best you can do?”

From the time our parent’s first put us out there in the world most of us have probably been told to “Do our Best” when we try to do something. No matter if we win or lose, we’ve been told that it’s ok as long as we “do the best we can” while trying. We seem to feel better at the outcome of almost anything if we feel that we’ve “Given our best shot” when we try to accomplish what we’ve set out to do. We all like to do our “best” and we hope that our “best” will be good enough.

This begs the question… is what you’re doing today in EMS “the best you can do?” Career wise, operationally, with your service’s treatments, with your own personal training and education, and with your own attitude… is this really “the best you can do?”

I would like to think that I “try my best” in my own EMS career and paramedic practice. I would also like to think that I work for an EMS organization that is trying to do the best it can for its people and its collective patients. However, there are quite a few situations where I have felt that I have not done or have been prevented from doing my best for a number of reasons. Some are reasonable and others are not. I’d think that all of us would give the answer that we always want to provide every patient with our “best” possible care. However, I’d also guess that everyone reading this can think back to any number of situations where they feel that they didn’t give it. Sometimes this reason comes down to the skill set of the individual provider. This could be a situation where the provider didn’t have the best possible information or knowledge available to them. They may have provided an ineffective or even harmful treatment modality or might have failed to act upon a missed assessment finding, such as by giving a medication for which a patient has a documented allergy because the provider didn’t know or simply forgot that the patient had the allergy. Sometimes the actions of others in the organization can prevent a provider from rendering the best possible care. This could be by failing to check, clean, or restock a needed piece of equipment or by providing inadequate care prior to a provider assuming patient care such as in the case of a first-responder crew failing to place a patient in full c-spine precautions when indicated prior to moving a patient to the transporting ambulance and the transporting EMT not having enough manpower to safely immobilize the patient. Sometimes the organization can hinder an EMS provider from doing his or her best by doing things such as providing inadequate equipment or medical protocols, or by mandating that a provider regularly work past exhaustion-level hours.

People inherently want to do well at whatever they choose to do for their careers as well as at other tasks where they feel strongly about the outcome. I may have accepted that I’ll never be as good of a basketball player as Michael Jordan, nor the same-level of cartoonist as Scott Adams, nor the best noodler in the world… but I’m certainly going to try to be the best paramedic I can be.

THIS guy, however, may be The Best Noodler In the World

Sometimes our own personal biases prevent us from doing the best we can do and for this I’m not talking about bias regarding any protected classes or topic, rather I’m talking about our own version of the status quo. A personal example of this would be my ALS Quick Response Vehicle at work. We went a solid week without having the proper forms available for the daily equipment checks and I didn’t have the computer access to print more off. During that week, I got in the habit of not using the forms and simply checked the truck based upon my knowledge of what was supposed to be in there and what was supposed to be checked. The way it played out, I ended up continuing to not use the check sheets when checking the vehicle, even though the forms had been replenished. A few weeks later, someone found that there was equipment missing in the vehicle that had gone unnoticed for some time. At that point, I realized that I had developed my own bias against using the forms for a reason that is even unbeknownst to me. I had gotten in the rhythm of not using the forms, and that caused me to miss that the infrequently-used piece of equipment was missing. I had developed a personal mental bias that prevented me from “doing my best” and thoroughly checking the truck.

Another preventer of best practices can be organizational politics, both internal and external. As a paramedic who regularly responds to other ambulance services to provide “ALS Intercepts”, I have observed that the politics between the services we work with can affect patient care for both the negative and the positive. While I am not saying that any of these arrangements result in inadequate patient care, I can say that the services with whom I interface most frequently and most pleasantly get a better provider out of me than do the services with whom my relations are less frequent or are strained due to political turmoil. When I respond to a request for an ALS intercept, I am being called to the “house” of another group of providers. While I am the highest level of care on the scene, I’m also a guest in their house. They have their own internal biases and I have mine. Sometimes the synergy in our working relationship can be strained, which results in a palpable difference in the flow of the scene and the teamwork exhibited at it. While I will ensure that I “do my best”, it’s easier to do it when I work well with the team I’m working with.

So how do we change things? We’re all human and we all have things that prevent our “best shot” from being the only thing that we “give it” in our EMS careers. This may be consciously, as in the case of internal politics; Subconsciously, as in the case of my not using the check sheet; or Involuntary, as in our service not providing us with needed equipment or our coworkers failing to replace an item in the ambulance that we did not have an opportunity to check. As in most things, the easiest thing for us to change is ourselves. Changing ourselves is a great place to start and will make serving as an example to others your main tool to use to try and get the best out of them.

Most situations can be made better and almost all of us can try harder. The secret is to attempt to do our “best” at all times and to try and ingrain our own best practices into our daily routines. This can be as simple as always trying to check the truck in the most thorough way possible or by making sure that you always check and recheck things to ensure that they’re done right. It helps to continuously seek out and recognize one’s own personal biases, (remember my check sheet?) to make sure that our own preferences and routines aren’t leading to suboptimal performance. Consistently ask yourself if what you’re doing is the “best you can do” and then ask yourself what you can do to make it your best. Mentally prepare yourself for your shifts with adequate rest when possible, manage your stress level so you can keep your thoughts focused on your care, and train hard. Ingrain your best efforts into the systematic way you do things and make your best way your normal way of doing things. We can’t change everyone around us in an instant, but our quiet positive efforts can pay large dividends in how people around us think, feel, and act. Our best may in turn get the best out of our partner, which may in turn get the best out of the next crew, and so forth. Soon enough… deciding to give our best may change your organization, our industry, or our profession.

And I assure you, doing your best will indeed make the difference in someone’s life. It’s just what we do, Folks.

“Is that the best you can do??

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For more on doing your best in EMS and in getting the best out of your EMS people read:  “The Shine Factor”

Posted by on August 19, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, ALS Intercept, Ambulance cleaning, Command & Leadership, edemse, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS ethics, EMS Topics, EMS training, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter, Management, Paramedic, Patient Management, politics, pride, profession, professionalism, Training & Development, training-fire-rescue-topics, Uncategorized

Automatic Window Roller Uppers and Other “Great” Ideas

12 comments

A few years back I had the chance to drive a 1997 Saturn 5-speed coupe for a while. It was a pretty nice car and I drove it back and forth on my tri-weekly 2 hour commute from the Quad Cities of IL to the Chicago Suburbs for my 24hr ambulance shift. It actually worked out well because the pay for paramedics was so much higher in the Chicago area than it was where I lived. I’d go up, do a 24 or a 48 hour shift, and have plenty of time to work my other jobs back home.  I didn’t really mind the drive but I’d save so much money by driving the Saturn instead of my full-size truck that I’d drive it whenever the ex-gf would let me.

One thing about driving the highways around Chicago is the incessant amount of toll-booths that one must cross while driving there. There are literally more toll-booths than I can count and every one of them requires a person to get out of traffic, stop, and pay the toll. It’s annoying in a car with an automatic transmission and even more annoying with a manual transmission. It aggravates me to say the least.

One of the features of the 97 Saturn SL 2 Coupe is an automatic window roller downer (is there a better name for that?) where the window will roll all the way down with just one click of the button. It was actually pretty handy for going through a toll-booth in a car with a manual transmission. I could click the button, then focus on downshifting for the quickest stop possible. This feature is common on cars nowadays, but back in the primitive turn-of-the-century it was my first Automatic Window Roller Downer Feature and I thought it was pretty cool… Except for one problem:

The window only went down automatically, It wouldn’t roll back up with only one click and had to be *manually* automatically rolled back up again. Yes, by this I mean I actually had to use one whole finger to hold the button. It was kind of a minor annoyance when I had to reaccelerate while shifting the manual transmission. Back then I didn’t think it was a huge annoyance, mind you… but I thought that the simple addition of an automatic roller back upper feature would have been much better. I could just imagine that the simple change would make it more useful and I was a tad angry about the shortsightedness of the engineers. I mean, why couldn’t they have thought of this when it seemed so obvious to my 20yo self? If I had thought of it had to be a good idea, right?

Well then some years later, I rented a car that actually had both an automatic roller downer feature *and* an automatic roller upper feature. I was so happy to find that! It was SO COOL! Finally the engineers had listened to my private thoughts that I never shared with anyone and put in my feature! I was happy.

Then I tried it for a while… and it sucked.

Yea, having a “one click” roller upper feature means never just cracking the window open a bit. One click may bring the window down a touch, but the auto feature keeps it rolling down all the way. In the previous design, without the automatic roller upper, this could be stopped by one quick click in the other direction. However, with the automatic roller upper feature, the window just rolls back all the way up! Getting the window open just a little bit is nearly impossible. Then I thought that if a kid or a less-than-intelligent adult chanced to stick their head through the open window and the button got depressed, the window could roll all the way up and choke them. The automatic window roller upper feature is annoying as heck and wasn’t the great idea that I thought it would be. It was an idea that I didn’t think all the way though. I thought I was smart and well, I wasn’t. It’s probably a good idea that I didn’t get all fired up and start a national letter writing campaign to lobby the car companies to put in automatic window roller upper features (Which I would have urged them to rename to “Chris’s Awesome Mega RoLL uPPahhz”) because then I would have looked like an idiot to more people than just myself. It’s the reason why I rarely orchestrate nationwide letter writing campaigns: experience. 

This got me thinking about all of the ideas that I’ve had about things in EMS and in other aspects of my career that I didn’t think wholly through. Steve Whitehead, the genius behind http://www.TheEMTspot.com wrote an article recently that spoke of the fatal flaws in the heroes of Greek Tragedy that I really liked. You can find the article here “8 Tragic EMS Behavior Flaws to Avoid” (I’ll link it at the end too, because you really should read it) but here’s what struck me so blatantly in the article:

The Critic – “This is all so stupid”

This is perhaps the easiest of all the hero flaws to slip into and the toughest to shake. The critic is convinced that the world desperately needs his or her opinions on the way things ought to be.  They figure out that offering opinions is so much more fun and rewarding than working to solve a problem and then it becomes like a drug. Soon they’re framing everything they see with the question, “How should this be done better?” and then offering their sage analysis. Usually with a poor understanding of why the thing is the way it is in the first place.

The problem with the critic is that they genuinely believe that the world wants to hear their endless assessments and when an army of engineers doesn’t show up to start doing the hard work of implementing all their great ideas, they get frustrated. The second problem is that they jump to analysis without seeking to ever understand the nature of the problem. Research and implementation are hard, but critical evaluation is fun and easy. As long as they don’t build anything real, they never have to worry about the next critic showing up, spending a few minutes looking at what they built and offering up their sage criticism.

This is the part of Steve’s article that really got me thinking. Have I been “The Critic” too often in my career? I mean, I don’t try to do this… but I find faults in a lot of aspects of contemporary EMS. I look at things and try to find ways to make them better. If you’re a regular reader, in-fact, that’s probably why you come to read what I have to say as often as you do. New ideas are great.

However, as my Automatic Window Roller Upper debacle (that yes, wholly occurred only within the boundaries of my own cranial cavity) has shown, some ideas that come to me and seem so obvious can also be bad ideas. My experience has proven to me time and time again that I need to think things through. I try, but EMS doesn’t always allow us the time to consider all options, let alone every aspect of every option. The Law of Unintended Consequences abounds and rears its ugly head quite often.

As the years have drug on, I’ve been trying to analyze my “Great” ideas more fully, but one person rarely has the ability to completely devise the correct answer to every problem. Two heads are better than one a lot of the time and systems have a way of developing themselves.

So as we go forth to change this thing we call EMS and usher in the new world of EMS 2.0, let’s remember to consider as many reasoned opinions as we can. We need your input and we need your participation. The more we grow together, the better our ideas become.

Oh, and here’s that link to Steve’s Article again: “8 Tragic EMS Behavior Flaws to Avoid”

Posted by on August 16, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, ckemtp, Command & Leadership, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, ems 2.0, EMS Management, EMS Motivation, EMS Topics, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter, grumblemedics, inside the mind of a paramedic, Paramedic, paramedic education, Training & Development, training-fire-rescue-topics

Thanks Rogue Medic – What are EMS’s “Fad Diagnoses”?

13 comments

Our friend Rogue Medic has a shiny new site up there on the Interwebs. It rocks. Rogue Medic is one of the many, many bloggers, non-bloggers, and/or random people who are much, much smarter than I am. I read his site a lot and I am very pleased to throw a link to his new site. He’s part of a new blog network with the URL Http://www.EMSblogs.com. Rogue has been joined by our other friends David Konig and Too Old To Work, Too Young to Retire.

That URL again for Rogue Medic is: Http://www.RogueMedic.com

Too Old to Work’s new digs are at: Http://www.ToOldToWork.com (yes, I know the “To” should be a “Too” and it just bugs the hell out of me as well)

And you can find everyone on their network on Http://www.EMSblogs.com 

Anyways, since this is my blog and you’ll come back here eventually. Rogue Medic pointed me to a site that I’m quite surprised I hadn’t found before Http://www.QuackWatch.com It’s provided me with some hours of entertainment tonight and since I’m a nerd and I admit it, that’s ok for me.

On QuackWatch, I read an interesting article on “Fad Diagnoses” with a handy checklist at the end that tells one how to create a bona-fide fad disease. (The article is here, with a lot of handy links: http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/fadindex.html)

 The checklist, which is just entertaining as hell, is below:

 Recipe for a New Fad Disease

  • Pick any symptoms—the more common the better.
  • Pick any disease—real or invented. (Real diseases have more potential for confusion because their existence can’t be denied.)
  • Assign lots of symptoms to the disease.
  • Say that millions of undiagnosed people suffer from it.
  • Pick a few treatments. Including supplements will enable health food stores and chiropractors to get in on the action.
  • Promote your theories through books and talk shows.
  • Don’t compete with other fad diseases. Say that yours predisposes people to the rest or vice versa.
  • Claim that the medical establishment, the drug companies, and the chemical industry are against you.
  • State that the medical profession is afraid of your competition or trying to protect its turf.
  • If challenged to prove your claims, say that you lack the money for research, that you are too busy getting sick people well, and that your clinical results speak for themselves.

 

This checklist got me to thinking about what “fad diseases” we may be treating as Paramedics and EMTs in the prehospital setting. While logically, I can think that we must be treating diagnoses that are more en-vogue than others, I can’t really seem to think of one off hand. I blame it on a mixture of my long day and my ADD. I would guess that our contemporary collective attention to STEMI care could be one. While ST-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction’s are quite serious and require immediate intervention, haven’t you noticed that we never call anything a “heart attack” anymore and now everything’s a STEMI? Do we emphasize the diagnosis of the STEMI at the expense of other conditions, such as Thoracic Aneurism or a Pulmonary Embolism? What about non-STEMIs?

Since I’m drawing a blank on something where I believe that logically, I should be able to think of something, I’m asking for your opinions:

What are the “Fad Diagnoses” of contemporary EMS? Feel free to add your own in the comments section below. I’m sure this could get wildly entertaining.

(Oh, and I’m not making any clams as to the existence or non-existence of any of the “Fad Diagnoses” posted here or on the other site. If you think they’re real, then heck… why not?)

Posted by on August 12, 2010 • Filed under: Emergency Medical Services, EMS, ems education, EMS ethics, EMS Topics, Paramedic, patient care, Patient Management, politics, STEMI, Training & Development

You Can Nap if You Want To! Or You can Leave Your Calls Behind!

17 comments

What a week! You’ve been pulling at least a double shift a week at your full-time ambulance job and have been hitting it pretty hard at your part-time job as well. Both services can’t seem to keep their schedules filled and everyone’s been working lots of hours in order to keep the doors going up and the trucks going out. To top it all off, the citizens just can’t seem to be good lately and both services’ call volumes have been high.

You were tired when you got up this morning and were seriously considering a nap after your morning shower, but after a gallon or two of coffee you were bright and shiny in your uniform at your station, ready for another day of EMS greatness.

That was five hours ago though, and the early barrage of calls fired at you this morning has turned into an afternoon lull. Now you’re sitting at your main station, close to the brass, with the words in the educational article you’re reading fading in and out of your bleary, cross-eyed vision. Since the activity level has decreased, you’ve gotten yourself a case of the sleepies that you just can’t shake. Since you’ve been consuming the steaming bean juice religiously lately, your stomach just won’t let you think of having another cup of the acrid station coffee and there’s no shift chores left to do, since you did them an hour ago fighting the same lethargy.

Unfortunately, in three hours you can see a long distance transfer scheduled that you’re probably going to have to do. Four hours of monotonous highway driving and the radio in the truck doesn’t have that great of reception. You don’t have any idea how you’re going to stay awake enough to drive the truck and that’s not even considering the fact that if the tones went off right now for an emergency you probably wouldn’t remember how to put on a band-aid, let alone remember a drug calculation.

You’re tired, you’re fatigued, and your body’s telling you that you’ve been pushing it too hard. It wants to shut down for a while. Your brain won’t think. You’re mouth won’t talk. You can’t keep your eyes open and wake up with a startle when you’ve realized you’ve dozed off for a bit. This is torture.

Sleep deprivation is no stranger to EMS people. We’ve all fought the lethargy caused by long 24, 48, and more-hour shifts. A great number of us work more than one job to make ends meet and pack as much family time and recreation into our off time as we can. A lot of us are going for more education and all of us get woken up from our sleep a lot more often than is healthy to run on calls. I regularly miss full nights of sleep and rarely have a night when I can say I got a full night’s sleep. We get use to it some of the way, but our bodies just aren’t meant for chronic sleep deprivation. We need to reset and reorder our brains and let our bodies recharge once in a while.

Unfortunately, our communities need us and we have to be there for them. EMS is important and it’s easy to get sucked in.

That’s why in this situation, I have very little dispute with taking a “Safety Nap”.

"SSSS-AAAA-FFFF-EEEE...."

The “Safety Nap” is a quick power nap. A shut-down and reset period where a person who never knows when they may be called to be up all night without sleep can rest and relax for a while and ensure that they’ll be wide awake and alert for whatever they may be called to do. I took an hour last shift around 3pm as a matter of fact. I didn’t get to sleep until 1am afterwards and I was up at 5am for a call. EMS is like that, shift work is like that. We have to ensure that we’re well-rested enough to make quality decisions of the type we have to when they need to be made… and we can’t do them well when we’re drooling on ourselves from exhaustion. One of Murphy’s laws for EMS states that “You know you’re in EMS when your favorite hallucinogen is sheer exhaustion” and I have to tell you, I’ve done that while on duty before. It’s just not safe.

There are problems with this, I know. Some will say that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be scheduled this many hours and that it’s irresponsible to do so. Well, then they can come talk to my bosses and pay my mortgage. Some people will sleep all day if they let them, and won’t put any effort into their shifts unless they have to. That has to be monitored. With that said, a balance has to be sought. I see nothing wrong with the occasional safety nap and I believe that EMS managers should allow it. They also should be unafraid to throw a cup of cold water on the Rip Van Winkles among us to ensure that they pull their weight with the non-call-response aspects of an EMS job.

What do you think? Does your employer allow “Safety Naps”? Do you take them?

I’d write more but Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Posted by on August 4, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, Ambulance, ambulance humor, Command & Leadership, Emergency Medical Services, EMS, EMS Health & Safety, EMS Humor, EMS Management, EMS safety, EMS Topics, EMT, Ethics, Fire Rescue Topics, Firefighter Safety & Health, Management, Paramedic, patient care, Patient Management, salary, shift length, Uncategorized

What is the next “Low Hanging Fruit” of EMS 2.0 and of US Healthcare Reform?

12 comments

I’d like to ask a question to all of you medical-type folks out there, and for this one I’d like other healthcare professionals to weigh in, not just EMS. Of course, Paramedics and EMTs are encouraged to answer this question, but so are Physicians and Nurses (RN and LPNs), as well as CNAs and Techs. 

A conversation I had on Twitter regarding administration of 10% Dextrose IV (D-10) as opposed to 50% Dextrose IV (D-50) for hypoglycemic ambulance patients has me wondering something about how we paramedics can create major savings and improve patient care in a short amount of time. We need to look for more “Low Hanging Fruit”.

It is common practice for known diabetic patients presenting with low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) to receive a treatment with IV D-50, IM Glucagon, oral Glucose, or even with the “Kaiser Cocktail” and then sign off with an AMA refusal. The patients are encouraged to eat something containing protein and complex carbohydrates and are usually left in the care of one of their family members and/or friends who can watch them for a while and make sure they’re ok.

I’d say that calls like this make up a fairly large percentage of all calls for an ambulance. While I have no statistics to back me up, I would guess that it could be something like 5% or better. This complaint and resultant treatment pathway is something I do quite frequently in my own practice. Judging from my own experience, I would say it happens quite frequently in most other paramedics’ practices as well.

The question about administering D-10, as brought up by my twitter peep @un_ojo, is if all patients getting treatment with D-10 as opposed to D-50 should be transported to an Emergency Room. My answer was that I believe a 100% transport policy in this case would result in a lot of people being transported to an ER when they probably didn’t really need to be. This would result in a large population of non-emergent ambulance patients going to the ER who in the past would have been “treated and released” (at least under the guise of an AMA refusal) by EMS crews.

And that got me thinking about this question:

If paramedics did not currently have the means to treat hypoglycemia and every one of those patients were being transported to the ER, how much of a burden on the emergency healthcare system would be removed simply by giving paramedics D-50? Probably quite a bit, right?

What other common medical cases would be as appropriate for field “treat and release” (or “Treat and AMA”) care by EMS? If we save a few hundred trips to the ER by being able to sweeten-up and then release common hypoglycemics, what other conditions might we be doing the same for as safely and effectively?

Would this require some easily attainable training? What about new medications and/or equipment?

I look at this as the “Low Hanging Fruit” if you will, of EMS 2.0, and also of healthcare reform. I am a proponent of EMS crews handling more primary care duties, or failing that, of at least having more options in regards to treatment pathways.

That’s what I’m looking for here, folks. What could we do within six months that would make a big impact?

Please discuss in the comments section, and feel free to shoot me an e-mail at ProEMS1@yahoo.com. You can also weigh in on the LUTL Facebook page if you’d like.

Also, would you do me a favor and invite some of the other healthcare people to the party? I’d love to get some of their opinions on this.

Posted by on July 26, 2010 • Filed under: Administration & Leadership, Als, Emergency Medical Services, Emergency Nurse, Emergency room, EMS, ems 2.0, EMS system, EMS Topics, Paramedic, physician, potential, Protocol development, us
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