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I don’t know what I’m more jealous of: the fact that someone has the creativity to build a fully accurate model of a UK ambulance out of Legos (complete to the rear stretcher lift), or the fact that someone has the time to do so.
See more here. See an entire Lego Fire District–multiple departments serving several “cities”–here.
The regional coordinating EMS authority covering Pittsburgh decided to put together a little campaign to boost EMS awareness among the general population. It consists of posters and a website, dourealize.com. (The more grammatically correct doyourealize.com is already taken.) The posters and website ask the same questions; I will do whoever put these together a favor by ignoring the odd (if not outright wrong) grammatical construction of such questions as “Do you realize the name of your local ambulance service?” I will try to also not take too much note of the fact that “in the calendar year 2007 in Pennsylvania” is a sentence beginning that requires all of the sentence completions to be in the past tense, but only one is, and that you actually can no longer say “thank you” in 2007.
No, I’m going to take issue with the link to the EMS Week Myspace page, which as of this moment prominently features a tribute…to nurses.
I’ve frequently said that North Carolina must not have much going for it if their biggest point of pride–immortalized on both their license plate and state quarter–is the accomplishment of two visiting Ohioans. That said, I must admit that being “First in Flight” (even if only because you have a windy spot with soft sand landings) is a touch better than the best selling point U-Haul could think of for North Dakota (a state so embarrassed by itself that there have been at least 3 attempts to drop the “North”):
My wife and I were leaving the park with one dog apiece when the person walking out with us got a call asking if we were there–the caller saw another dog owner fall and thought he was having a stroke.
Of course, when in doubt, call 911. We were still a few hundred feet away–what else were we going to do but give that advice? As we began heading over to where the guy fell, my wife took the dog off me with an evil grin: “I’m not the highest level provider on scene–it’s all you.”
That’s probably the hardest part of transitioning from being a medic to being a higher-level provider: the fact that is is all you. As a medic, if I didn’t know what was going on with a patient, I could always just get the patient to the hospital and let the doc figure it out. Now, I’m going to be on the receiving end of that thought.
I still don’t know what happened to the guy at the park. I do know that it’s been a long time since I was around for an ambulance call but wasn’t part of the crew…and that’s always a strange feeling.
National Trauma Awareness Month (which, as I’ve noted before, happens to coincide with Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month) is probably the best time of year to ask this question, even better than February, which was when an article titled “Trauma Surgery: Discipline in Crisis” was published. It’s an interesting read, and basically points out the exaggeration behind what we were all taught in paramedic school: that “trauma is a surgical disease.” (Apparently the phrase remains prominent in the ATLS textbook as well.)
Basically, the author paints a picture of trauma surgeons as increasingly demoralized as their lives are strained by the constant on-call nature of trauma surgery, their pocketbooks are strained by the number of uninsured trauma patients, and their experience is diminished as the percentage of trauma team activations that actually lead to an emergency surgery drop into the single digits (particularly for blunt trauma, and pediatric blunt trauma–the author reports that at his hospital, surgeons would see an emergency operation less often than every third year). The most clear changes that fed this are improved imaging and the discovery that many spleen and liver injuries will heal themselves.
This all raises an excellent question about whether a hospital needs to have a surgeon present at every single trauma activation. (The correct answer: probably not. At the very least, there is no solid proof that the surgeon-centric model is better than the non-surgeon model used in Europe; if anything, there are studies suggesting no difference between the two, even in clearly critical patients.) More interesting to me, however, is how thoroughly the statistics destroy the myth of trauma being an exclusively (or even a primarily) surgical disease. Maybe we can throw this saying on the stack of EMS sayings that have no merit, with the “Golden Hour” on the bottom of the pile.
Courtesy JEMS:
UNITED KINGDOM — A paramedic was facing disciplinary action today after he walked into a supermarket crowded with shoppers wearing just a thong.
The ambulanceman had been on duty when he strode defiantly into the Tesco store wearing just the underwear and a pair of socks after staff refused to serve him while he was wearing his ambulance uniform.
I’m not sure which is most disturbing: the fact that this guy was trying to buy booze while on duty, the fact that the booze was so important he decided to strip to buy it, or the fact that under his uniform he was wearing only a thong.
Someone on a forum I frequent pointed out this statement from a Department of Homeland Security press release about the H1N1 flu sweeping the nation (or not, as the case may be):
Anyone exhibiting symptoms is being referred to an isolation room where they can be evaluated by a public health official before proceeding to their destination*.
The asterisk guides the reader down to the bottom of the page, where the DHS notes that there was a typo in the original version of the page. The original version read:
Anyone exhibiting symptoms is being referred to an isolation room where they can be evaluated by a public health official before proceeding to their destruction.
If there was ever a case of a small typo changing the meaning of a sentence drastically, I think this was it; I’m sure it gives fodder to the conspiracy theorists out there. And always remember, Soylent Green is people.
The shotgun is loaded, so I have done it: uploaded a response to the video “Fire Service-Based EMS: The Right Response.” You are welcome to view it on YouTube (in two parts), or download it directly for your repeated viewing pleasure. (478MB mpeg or 230MB avi, right-click and “Save Target As”) All websites referred to in the video are available as links below, along with a little bit of rationale.
I didn’t know that newspapers were having a competition to see which one could put out the scariest, most overblown, panic-inducing swine flu headline, but I think the Toledo Blade won it this morning. If I hadn’t already published a Sunday Silliness, this would certainly have been in that category.
I guess they’re just not as up on the latest data as the LA Times.
Courtesy Reason, a new book which promises the most entertaining battle royale to hit fiction since, well, the invention of fiction, in which “all of the characters ever played by William Shatner are suddenly sucked into our world. Their mission: hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner.”
