dr-exmedic.com

It’s not at all uncommon for someone with a life-threatening allergy to be prescribed an Epi-Pen (or its newer cousin, the Twinject).  Apparently, however, in the stress of the moment, it’s also not all that hard to forget how to use it:  a study so new I can’t find an actual copy of it has found a few dozen cases of accidental autoinjector misuse over the last few years.  It’s not surprising, as even doctors have fallen prone to sticking themselves, and those are the folks who are supposed to be teaching laypeople how to use these things (despite the fact that only 1/28 tested could use one 100% correctly). 

I’m glad, then, that some areas are thinking about allowing 911 call takers to give autoinjector instructions over the phone.  Using an autoinjector is much easier than, say, performing CPR, and we already give those instructions over the phone all the time.  The tough part is figuring out who actually needs a dose of epi–and to be perfectly honest, part of that selection has already happened when a person gets a prescription for one of these devices.  After all, there aren’t too many non-allergic people out there carrying these things around.

About the only better idea I could think of is having dispatch forward the official training videos to the patient over their cell phones.  Of course, land-line callers would kind of get the shaft there….