Remember to be gentle with yourselves and others. We are all children of chance and none can say why some fields blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Their dreams are no less than yours. Care less for your harvest than for how it is shared and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace. – Kent Nerburn, Author
Let me begin by saying how thankful I am for the amazing harvest that we had at The EMT Spot in August. The site set new records for unique visitors in a day and total visitors for the month. I’m proud of what we created here this month. We started with a simple truth, You Can’t give Away What You Don’t Have and a simple request, Be Remarkable. I shared Six Techniques to Nail The IV Every Time and told the story of a bunch of seniors who Got Nude to Protect Their Local Volunteer Squad.
After that we pushed our understanding of The 1-10 Pain Scale and talked a bit about the gear we carry in What’s In Your Pockets? I asked you to make peace with the idea that much of your medicine is Simply Wrong and gave you some tips to Make Sure Your Hand-Off Report Gets Heard. For my contribution to The Handover Blog Carnival, I discussed My First Cardiac Arrest and then dove into the Use of OPQRST.
I ended the month off by trying something a little different. I asked the readers to contribute ideas to my first ever Readers Survey. The response far exceeded my expectations. Thank you for all the input. If you haven’t done so, there’s still time to take the survey here. I’ll tell you about the results in September.
Elsewhere around the blogsphere, The Happy Medic wrote an in-your-face letter to a partner he lovingly nicknamed God’s Gift To Firefighting. Rescuing Providence launched a new blog site and reminded us that a higher power decides the outcomes in At Peace. Medic999 put together a well designed presentation of this months Handover Blog Carnival with the subject The First Emergency. Greg Friese from Everyday EMS Tips highlighted a video everyone should watch about the history of an amazing EMS icon, Medic One and talked a bit about the use of AVPU in assessing level of consciousness.
Reynolds from Random Acts of Reality told us a story about power, authority and Eye Contact while Kim at Emergiblog rants about the very human but sometimes selfish pursuit of need in The Smile on My Face. Epijunki revives an old cartoon series to good effect in Goofus and Gallant, EMS Edition and Rouge Medic pulls no punches with his spot on commentary about the Florida Medical Director who … wait a minute.
Speaking of EMS news, a Florida medical Director made headlines when he got fed up with the local fire departments lack of training and pulled the certifications of 25 paramedics. And while were talking about Floridians (Is that a word?) behaving badly, a 48 year old woman took a Florida ambulance for a joy ride. In Cocke County TN a dispatcher sent the wrong ambulance a vehicle accident and, if the family of the patient have their say, the error will cost the company 7.5 million. Of course, to prove that things could always be worse, a Louisville, KY EMT is being charged with murder for his role in a fatal ambulance crash.
A Tulsa, OK service reduced hospital diverts to zero over a four month period by adopting one simple policy. The director o FEMA decided to quit tweeting when he received his directorship but made a few waves when he decided to once again send tweets to his twitter followers. And in one of the more bizarre ambulance crash stories I’ve heard, an Indianapolis crew was transporting one shooting victim to the hospital and found a second shooting victim in the vehicle that crashed into their ambulance during transport.
If podcasting is your thing, there are a bunch of good ones out there on the subject of EMS. This month it seemed like everyone was trying to podcast from some sort of conference. The EMS Garage tackled Tradition in EMS and Cardiac Arrest Survival before doing a live show from the Wyoming EMS Conference. The EMS Educast put PowerPoint and podcasts in the spotlight, The EMS Medicast dug into the Kinematics of Trauma and Buck Feris over at Copy Code Three pieced together a really bad day in EMS with Reconstruction.
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